When Does Life Begin?

When does life begin? It sounds like a simple question, doesn’t it? Certainly it is a question to which one could give at least one’s personal opinion.

Not so fast. At least when asked in regard to abortion issues, “When does life begin?” is a smokescreen, a red herring, a trick question. It’s a “gotcha” waiting to happen.

Even scientists do not fully agree on what constitutes “life.” But by most definitions I can find, a single sperm cell or a single ovum, qualifies, as do most other single cells in the human body. Is that what the questioner means? Probably not.

Rephrase it perhaps, to “When does human life begin?” Not very helpful, as too general. OK, then, how about “When does a discrete human life begin?” Better.

Let’s posit that a discrete human life begins when sperm and ovum join. But wait! What if that entity later splits into two, producing identical twins? Did two discrete human lives begin when a single sperm and ovum joined? Did that single entity possess two lives? Or is one the original life, and the other just a copy? If so, which is which?

But that doesn’t really matter for abortion discussions, because it still isn’t the question that is actually being asked. That question is “When does a human life begin that is entitled not to be ended by another’s deliberate action?”* And that is the question on which people differ. Some say when the sperm and ovum unite, some say when the embryo is implanted, some say when life outside the womb is technically possible, some say at birth. Some say only when the life is wanted by the woman incubating it. Some at the radical ends argue either for the life-sacredness of the individual sperm and ovum or for the “right to life” not beginning until some period of time after birth.

It is a question that has occupied years of thought on the part of philosophers, theologians, and legal scholars. It is a question on which not all of them have decided on an answer, and of those who have, their answers do not agree. Small wonder, then, if the occasional person not able to devote their life to the question has not decided on an answer.

And then: it is a question regarding which some people are willing to impose their answer on everyone, and others are not.

*The obvious corollary is “When does a human life cease being entitled not to be ended by another’s deliberate action?” but this essay is not about war, self-defense, removing life support, capital punishment, etc.

Identity

I admit that I often find it hard to understand the Identity thing. Intellectually, I understand why Identity is empowering when one is in an oppressed group, but beyond that, I don’t quite “get” it. I am a gestalt of all my aspects. Just to name a few aspects, I am a biological woman with some stereotypical male psychological characteristics, I am a white person in a multiracial family, I am Irish and German by birth but have a strong cultural component of Mexican American, I am a Roman Catholic in the sense of having been raised in that religion and culture but am a nontheist, I am a mother who has never been pregnant. I am spouse, sister, aunt, niece, cousin, American, person of high IQ, collector of __ (many things), Iowan (born), Californian (raised), Minnesotan (now), unfaithful Democrat, liberal…  I was born and grew up in the working class, but am now solidly middle class, maybe even upper middle class. I am a professional editor of scholarly books who has no college degree. I am who I am, in my entirety.

Identity is a slippery concept. Everyone has more than one identity. Though most people have their identities more or less integrated, there are usually primary identities and secondary identities, and maybe far more levels than that. Asked, “What are you?” a person usually picks one or two; asked “How do you describe yourself?” a person makes a list, and some items are mentioned immediately.

Think of this situation: A sharply dressed busy white woman executive is on her way to a meeting and pauses at a street corner for directions. She sees these people: a black man dressed in expensive business clothes, a young tattooed Asian woman in punk dress, and a white man in a ball cap and jersey. Imagine that all make similar eye contact with her and have similarly receptive body language. Whom does she ask for directions? If her primary identity is class, she may ask the black executive; if it’s gender, she may ask the Asian punker; if it’s race, she may ask the white sports fan. If you put three different white female executives in that situation, you may well get three different identity-responses.

Members of an organization, attendees at a conference, and people in other life activities, including activists for causes, are not random groups. They are self-selected groups. They have CHOSEN an organization, a conference, an activity based on their own particular identities. Since a person has time/energy/money/”spoons” for only so many organizations and activities, a person generally chooses those that most closely match or support his/her identities. A white person of German heritage who sees herself as a supporter of racial justice may join the NAACP, while another may choose to join the German Club. A Latino counterculture artist may join an artists’ co-op, while another may work for La Raz. An accountant whose career is a perfect fit for her isn’t likely to go to seminars on opening your own franchise restaurant, but another who doesn’t see himself staying in an office forever may pay to go to the seminar. And those for whom one aspect of their identity is completely self-defining or who feel that it has completely defined them for others are likely to see the whole world through that lens.

For some women, being a woman is the central fact of their lives. They identify solely with women, they pick only women as mentors and role models, they join support groups with other women, they read books about “women’s issues,” they major in women’s studies in college, they become psychologists who see exclusively women or directors of shelters for battered women or authors of books on women’s issues or teachers of women’s studies. But that isn’t the way it is for all women–certainly not for me. Some are spending so much time and energy being doctors, wives, teachers, parents, partners, school volunteers, whatever, that they don’t get around to their identities as women, because that’s not a primary identity.

If someone doesn’t immerse him/herself in one particular identity, it doesn’t have to mean that he/she is denying that identity or rejecting that identity. It can mean simply that he/she has other identities that are primary. And I think that no one else has the right to decide for another what her/his hierarchy of identity should be.

Why I Love Cowboy Music

I grew up with Hoppy and Gene and Roy, and Dale and Annie, too. I think that as many of my basic values came from the Lone Ranger as from my Catholic schooling: Do what’s right, no matter what anyone thinks, and do it for its own sake, because it’s right, then don’t stick around to take credit for it.

Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, the real people, were my first inspiration for having a multiracial/multiethnic adoptive family of kids with special needs.

I’m not much of a one for having heroes: there are people who live right and people who don’t. I do, however, like to acknowledge those who taught me some things about being a person who lives right.

Of course I could be wrong…

Once when I wrote:
“My viewpoint is that when you want to share knowledge, you START with the presumption that it is just possible that you are wrong.”
Someone asked me, why would you share knowledge that may be wrong?

My answer: Because that’s the only kind of knowledge there is. Unless, you know, you’re God or something.

I’ve thought about it more, and I stand by my answer. Even those who believe they get their knowledge from God are relying on their own, or someone else’s, human brain to interpret what they believe to be God’s word–and usually God’s word multiply translated through a couple of human languages. So unless one is personally running the universe, the only kind of knowledge there is, is knowledge that might possibly be wrong.

Where I seem to be different from many–by my observation most, maybe even almost all, but of course I could be wrong!–people is that I am perfectly comfortable with that. Well, maybe not perfectly, but sufficiently.

This can be inconvenient. It means that I often see, as clearly as one can feel is likely (you see what this philosophy does? everything has to be qualified), the “other side” of a disagreement or difference. There are any number of controversial issues on which I do have an opinion, but I understand very well where the other side comes from. The downside of that is that sometimes people who have considered me an ally are disappointed by my not joining them in demonizing the other side.

Another downside is that I’m very, very frustrated when I simply can’t understand a viewpoint, when I can’t grasp it, wrap my head around it–whatever metaphor you want. I find it hard to effectively oppose things I can’t understand. (And yes, there are things I think I should oppose, because that’s my best judgment at this point.)

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis speaks to me. (When it speaks to me in Hegel’s voice, or even Kant’s [when I take those quizzes, I usually wind up Kantian], my response tends to be “Huh?” or maybe “WTF?” But I digress.) Synthesis is, I think, a good one-word descriptor for my wordy “This is what I think right now, based on experience, observation, and knowledge up to this point.” Always, always maintaining the realization that while my experience is what it is, my observation and knowledge may be wrong.

Yeah. Knowledge that may be wrong is the only kind of knowledge there is.

Footprints in the Sand

At 16, I won a prize in a local poetry contest—I think it was second place—for this:

I walked along a lonely shore
Upon the just-damp land
And left behind me all the way
My footprints in the sand.
Though some washed clear, a few remained
To tell where I had been,
And someone may have seen and thought
Of something new to him,
For those few footprints somehow changed
The pattern of the land.
I left my mark upon the world—
My footprints in the sand.

Many years later, I heard the Starfish Story. You know that one, don’t you? If not, just Google it. It’s the final line that matters here:

“I made a difference to that one.”

That has been my main life-goal for a very long time: to make a difference to that one. I knew it at 16, which was 50 years ago, when I wrote that poem. My mark on the world would be just footprints in the sand that might happen to make some small positive difference in another’s life.  I’m still working in it.

White Pride

I don’t understand the concept of “white pride.”

To be fair, I don’t really understand “black pride” or “gay pride” or any of those others as well. But since I am white and straight, I am going to talk about “white pride.”

I have never grasped the idea of being proud of anything other than one’s own accomplishments. I have always been reluctant to say that I am “proud” of my (now adult) children’s achievements or character, because those are theirs, not mine. To say “I am proud of you” seems to take credit for something I didn’t do. Oh, I know that their dad and I contributed to their lives, but that’s just what we were supposed to do, the job of parenting. They are the ones who took our input along with everything else around them and within them, and turned it into wonderfulness.

So how much more strange it seems to me to take pride in things that were done by people who share one incidental, superficial characteristic with me, to take pride in things I made no contribution to at all. And if that characteristic is the color of my skin, my hair, my eyes–something I have absolutely no part in deciding or maintaining–it becomes downright bizarre.

The larger the group that shares the characteristic, the stranger this is to me. To take pride in being Irish American is less weird–“less,” but weird–to me than to take pride in being of Irish heritage or to take pride in being European American, and those less weird than to take pride in being “white.” Depending on the definition (I’m pretty sure that most people who claim “white pride” would not include as “white” Caucasians such as some [subcontinental] Indians and North Africans), there are hundreds of millions of “white” people alive today. Where is the “pride” in belonging to such a category?

If one is going to take pride in simply belonging to a category, I think that one must also take shame. If one is proud of being white like George Washington, one must also take shame in being white like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer. If one wants the pride of belonging to a group that one had no part in joining, one also must bear the shame.

For myself, the pride and the shame of things I have actually done is sufficient for my lifetime.

Lead characters and identification

Before I begin: I am not saying that there is no need for more strong, competent female lead characters in any genre, so please do not comment as if I am.

Am I the only female who has never, from childhood on, had any trouble identifying with male lead characters? (Surely not!) I read books, watched TV and movies, with both girls and boys, women and men, as main characters, and whether or not I identified with the character never had anything to do with their gender, but rather with whether the character resonated with me. I was never Tom Sawyer, but neither was I Becky Thatcher; I was, however, Huck Finn. I was Jo in Little Women and the sequels where she is grown up and married to the Professor, but I was never Rose in Eight Cousins; rather, I was kind of a combination of Phebe (the maid) and Cousin Mac. I was Dale in the Roy Rogers & Dale Evans Show, but I was never Annie in the Annie Oakley program. I identified with Zorro but never with Wonder Woman. I’m more Mickey than Minnie, and back in the old Mickey Mouse Club, I felt much more part of the boys on “Spin & Marty” than like Annette in her series.

When The Golden Girls came along, I didn’t identify with any of them, but I picked Sophia as my role model for aging–and I think I’m getting there! I felt more like Magnum, too, than like Jessica Fletcher. On NCIS I identify most with Ducky, and also McGee’s grandmother Penelope when she’s around; but on NCIS: LA I’m definitely Hetty. On Bones I identify most with a couple of the male interns, and not at all with any of the female characters.

I don’t experience my gender as nearly as essential to who I am as I do many other characteristics. So it’s the character of the character, so to speak, and not the gender, that I identify with.  Unless it’s a component of the plot, I don’t really think of the characters as “male” or “female” but as themselves. I’m not oblivious to the societal/cultural gender aspects as they show up, but those have nothing to do with my identification.

Do As I Say…

I’m tired of hypocrisy. I’m tired of religious people who say, “Deuteronomy says homosexuality is an abomination, but sure, I eat shrimp and mix my fibers.” I’m tired of right-wingers who say, “Get the government out of our lives, except in other peoples’ most personal and intimate relationships.” I’m tired of parents who think they’re teaching their kids by what they say, all the while their own actions do the opposite. I’m tired of people who claim to follow the Bible or the Constitution and know almost nothing about what it says, much less of the history of its time, or of anything written around the same time that might clarify it.

Believe anything you want. Follow any guidelines you want. But actually DO it. Know what the belief entails, know what the guidelines say, and then be consistent. If part of it makes no sense to you, or you just don’t like it, and you aren’t going to believe/follow that part, then don’t CLAIM to believe/follow the whole.

Be honest. Say, “I believe/follow what I want to and reject the rest.” Say, “I have one set of rules for you and a different set for myself.” Say, “I want the government to leave me alone but to make you do what I want.”

Have the guts to tell the truth at least about that.

“We have met the enemy, and he is us”

To quote the late Walt Kelly, in the words of his character Pogo.

There is no “Them.” There is only “Us.” We humans are all in this together. We are connected, interconnected, in ways that we cannot see, probably cannot imagine. Each one of us has all the potential that is exemplified by the best of us and the worst of us. Oh, of course some have physical or mental conditions that mean the potential–for good or ill–could never under any conditions be realized. But it’s there, and we go on ignoring that at our great peril.

Maybe there was a time in human evolution when dividing the world up into “Them” and “Us” served a useful purpose, promoted survival. That time has passed. With  communications technology expanding even as we use the latest thing, the connections, the interconnections, between us become more apparent every day. Someone in the remotest village has the possibility of knowing things about people anywhere in the world–things that someone in the most developed countries could never have known just a few decades ago. We learn about a disaster on the other side of the globe in minutes–sometimes we watch it as it happens–and not that long ago, as history goes, people might learn of a disaster in the next state, county, maybe even town only when someone traveled from there to tell the news.

There is a woman in India whom I know online. She is a generation younger than I, from a different culture, a different socioeconomic class, a different religious background–everything. Yet we have discovered that we have many values in common, that we have similar parenting styles, that we have elements of our personalities more like each other than like the people around us. What a wondrous thing such an acquaintance is, and how short a time it has been possible! But with this evidence in my own life, how can I believe in “Them” and “Us”?

In the current strife over guns, so many people see the other side as the enemy against whom they must protect themselves. But as Pogo said, the enemy is us.

Many fear gun owners, and so argue for more control, particularly to protect children. The Sandy Hook killing of 20 children was terrible, but the United States Government Accountability Office reports that more than 5 children die EVERY DAY from abuse. Yes, the U.S. has the worst record of children killed by guns, but we also have the worst record among industrialized nations for children killed by abuse. And it isn’t some “Them” killing these children; child abuse is found at every socioeconomic level, among every religious and ethnic group: “Us.” Where are the celebrities speaking out against that? Where are the bills introduced in the national and state legislatures? Where is the attention to protecting those little victims, 5 a day, every day, month after month, year after year?

Others fear the home-invading stranger, the thug on the street, and so argue for everyone to own a gun for protection. But just this week, what are the big stories? First, the military’s best sniper is killed at a shooting range, surrounded by guns that didn’t protect him–killed by someone he knew and was trying to help. Next, a young couple, then a police officer, are killed, and two other police wounded, by a former member of the LAPD and former navy officer. You don’t have to be a Google expert to find, every day, a story of a child accidentally killed with a parent’s gun or a domestic situation that turns deadly. That’s not “Them” doing it, that’s “Us.”

I am not making an argument for or against guns, nor for or against gun control. I am saying that statistically, the greatest danger to you from another person, whether by gun or any other means, comes from someone you know, maybe trust, even love. As long as we define “violence” (of whatever kind) as something “Them” does, we have no chance to defeat it.

One last point that ties into this: I cannot control what anyone else does. You cannot control what anyone else does. We can try persuasion (there are many kinds), and if we have the bent for it we can try force, but in the end each of us can control only the self. If there is a dividing line, it isn’t “Us” and “Them,” it’s “Me” and “Everyone Else.” The only thing I can do that will absolutely, certainly make the world more what I want it to be is to be that way myself. And that is true for each human.

 

An Old Broad’s Point of View

(Yes, I call myself an “old broad.” I consider it an honorable status.)

The future matters more than the present. The present matters more than the past.

Old white men, your power is the past. It no longer matters. Give it up.

Old white women, old women of color, old men of color, your chance at power is the past. It no longer matters. Give it up.

The future belongs to those who will live in it, those who will have to solve the problems we have created, or die trying. It belongs to our daughters and sons, our nephews and nieces, our grandchildren and students, the kids down the street and on the other side of the tracks.