Among middle class people, the norm is that we are confident our children are safe and have promising futures. Family life tends to be stuffy and intellectually dulling, and involves profound compromises, but people who start families are usually glad to. When we get older, we become more appreciative - the result of continuing hormonal changes, in addition to the continual influences of a broader range of life experiences. As we reach retirement and beyond, we enjoy more subtle forms of pleasure, and more acutely than ever we are afraid of pain and death. Yet despite being constantly confronted with death, and with gruesome diseases and injuries, we are usually glad to have been born, and glad that our own children were. Why do old people feel this way? To me, as a young person, I never found anything desirable about the lives of our elderly citizens. As I mentioned earlier, it's known that both men and women undergo hormonal changes in the course of their lives that continually shape their psyche. I admit that my understanding of every branch of science is weak, so I will not make any specific claims about the neuro-chemistry of aging. However, I will make a more abstract claim: it is in our evolutionary advantage to want to live longer. It's probably not best for our species to live too long, since otherwise evolution might not be giving us tumors, etc. However, older people do have wisdom to pass on. This is attested to in the great, all-time classic Guns, Germs and Steel. In it Jared Diamond wrote of a tribe in East Africa in which a famine occurred, destroying the staple crops, and the village elders helped them find several species of edible wild plants, and to distinguish them from the poisonous ones. This information was not available to those who had not experienced a famine on the same scale. If we go back a few millennia, most people did not live above 30, so someone with a few extra generations on them would be a dream.
Now in developed countries, as well as many middle-income countries, most people can expect to live long lives. But either way, people don't just live - they also, well, die. And when someone dies, even a hated or shunned person, it causes profound grief to those who know this person. When a child dies, that is heinous, unspeakable tragedy that causes the parents and others agonizing trauma that lasts for the rest of their lives. When a fetus dies, the people who knew the fetus most intimately can usually cope with much less difficulty.
Don't get me wrong, I think abortion is an evil that we should be doing far, far more to avoid. I just don't think the right approach should entail forcing people to give birth to children with HIV. I also think all people deserve to have their own children, especially since it says so in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But I think it's imperative that we wait for the right moment to have children. Why? Well, because the alternative is abortion. To demonstrate this point, let's look at statistics on the "abortion rates" of different countries. The abortion rate is the number of abortions that occur in one country in one year, divided by the number of women aged 15-44 in this country. In other words, it attempts to give us a fair per-capita estimate. I managed to find a compilation by the United Nations of abortion rates in a melange of countries, 61 in total. In order to supplement this data, I acquired more data from a website compiled by an enthusiastic and seemingly impartial physicist, in addition to a news articles specifically about Ireland and South Korea. The abortion rate in the US is 20.8, higher than Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Israel, South Africa, and 22 European countries. There were several (mostly very small) European countries that I could not find information for. Now let's look at some countries, in Europe and elsewhere, with higher abortion rates than us: Belarus, Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Estonia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Moldova, Mongolia, Romania, Seychelles, Ukraine, and the grand champion, Russia, with an abortion rate of 53.7. What do these fourteen countries have in common? Well, all of them I would think of as being socially conservative, and most are also very religious. And that means they tend to avoid condoms. To take a specific example, China's abortion rate is 24.2, significantly higher than the US. When I worked as an English teacher in Danfeng, China in 2010-2011, my students were a very warm, spirited crowd, but love was not in the air. I knew some of my students had boy or girl friends, but most were either expressly forbidden to start a relationship, discouraged from having a relationship if it might interfere with their work, or they never had the right opportunity. However, the male students knew where the nearby brothels were (and the female students were probably just as aware, since many were eager for extra cash). When the most familiar of these brothels came up in a conversation between me and a male student, I urged him to use protection, and he literally laughed at me. Go figure, I did not see condoms for sale once during the entire year I spent in Danfeng.
Interestingly, despite our reputation for being puritans and Evangelicals, the US has about the most liberal abortion laws anywhere - we allow abortion under any circumstance, and that has been true since 1973. The only countries today with the same policy are Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Cambodia, Greece, a handful of rich European countries, and a majority of communist and post-communist countries. At the other end of the spectrum, Chile has outlawed abortion even in cases when the mother would die otherwise, when the child was the result of rape or incest, when the unborn child has medical problems or birth defects, or when the mother will be unable to support the child. Seriously. What if the woman knows in advance that she will produce a stillbirth? There are also plenty of diseases that can be detected well before birth. What if she knows her baby will die from, say, cystic fibrosis, which without first-world healthcare usually kills the child within about 25 years, or Turner Syndrome, which kills the child in about 13 years, even with the best medicine, or Tay-Sachs disease, which invariably reduces a child's life expectancy to about 4 years even with the best medicine? Or what if prenatal tests reveal the child has neural tube defects, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, fragile x syndrome, thalassemia, polydactyly, Wolf-Hirschhorn Syndrome, other chromosomal abnormalities, certain cancers (in some cases), and other diseases that can be diagnosed before birth, and after birth will probably kill the child before age 30? And among the approximately 1.2 million children in the US with fetal alcohol syndrome, all of them could have had their disorder recognized, via ultrasound, before birth. And when children are born with Down Syndrome, they live through all kinds of difficulties that we don't, making their lives nasty, brutish and short, so are they really grateful? Did you ask them? How about those born with HIV, which can also be detected before birth? Or those created from incest? A tough call, since the mother will take so much pride in them. Or how about the millions and millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of infant girls in China and elsewhere who were deliberately killed after birth in recent decades? Or how about those who are immediately sold to child traffickers after birth (before the birth of this child is formally recognized by the government)? At one time there were no abortion laws with any relevance to most people. Not surprising, since there were no real abortions that were less painful or dangerous than the alternative. As a necessary result, it was common for women to see half of their children die. For most people, this was the case until well into the 20th century. Abortion laws gradually became a global phenomenon during the Cold War years. One unfortunate consequence was that God was under enormous stress to catch up with things. He had to read over the texts that He had written over the course of about 2000 years, starting from the creation of the universe, then inform the Pope of His reinterpretation. After His message was communicated to the Pope, the first pronouncement in this era from the Vatican came in 1987:
From the moment of conception, the life of every human being is to be respected in an absolute way because man is the only creature on earth that God has 'wished for himself,' and the spiritual soul of each man is 'immediately created by God'; his whole being bears the image of the Creator. Human life is sacred because from its beginning it involves the 'creative action of God,' and it remains forever in a special relationship with the Creator, who is its sole end. God alone is the Lord of life from its beginning until its end; no one can, in any circumstance, claim for himself the right directly to destroy an innocent human being
The Catholic Church's position on contraception remained rather consistent until recently. Consider that in 2003, the journalist Steve Bradshaw argued in a documentary on BBC that, from his long experiences abroad, he observed the Vatican spreading rumors in poor countries of HIV passing through condoms, making them useless. Things would "soon" change, though, after a new pope was elected in 2005. This new Pope, Benedict XVI, would commit outright genocide in 2010: he proclaimed that not only is it better to use a condom than to give someone HIV, it's better to use a condom than to force a woman to give birth to a child with HIV. But if the virus makes it into the woman, it's there to stay, and it's there to stay in the baby. Let's remember: HIV is God's punishment for the sinners.
As I said, I think abortion is evil, and I am disgusted by the number of abortions that occur in today's world. However, I think it is not nearly cruel as letting a child live a short, abnormal life that involves an enormous amount of physical pain and social ostracization and an appearance so ugly that it causes others trauma. And as I said earlier, it's much easier to witness a fetus die than to witness a child die. One source of difficulty in discussing abortion is that if you say the wrong thing you'll go to hell, so many things are not sufficiently discussed. As of yet in abortion debates, one major theme has been whether fetuses are people. For purposes of this blog post, I will assume that they are. Given this assumption, there is one issue that I think should be at the center of these debates, and that is the question of neonatal perception. Rather pathetically, people rarely address this question, and it has received very little research. I think the Billy Grahams prefer it that way, because the consensus among researchers has been more or less unanimous that fetuses cannot feel pain until usually after 20 weeks, slightly earlier in some cases. It has also been suggested that the fetus develops neuro-inhibitors that anesthetize it until birth. Moreover, people have suggested that anesthetics be used on fetuses during abortions, although this is generally not practiced because of concerns that these anesthetics can harm the mother. However, it is standard that anesthetics are used on fetuses during fetal surgeries, so they might be safe for abortions. Furthermore, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, it's about 1.4% of abortions occur after 20 weeks anyway.
And in arguing for abortion, the discussion would not be complete without referencing the bible. I have pasted in some links to some pro-life websites: Pro-Life America, American Right to Life, the Canadian "Interactive Bible" website, Priests For Life, God and Science (which may or may not be satirical), Bible Believers, Christian Answers, the EWTN "Global Catholic Network" website, Gospel Way, Pro-Life Forum ... I'll stop there. These websites each provide a different set of verses, but we can draw one conclusion from all of them: the Bible says nothing about abortion. However, it does emphasize the sanctity of human life, it condemns murder, it makes clear that humans are more sacred than other species, and it repeatedly asserts that unborn children are human. I cannot deny that the Bible makes these claims. However, the Bible also insists that the universe was created about 4,000 years ago, and it does contradict itself constantly, especially in the Old Testament. I will not waste space ridiculing the Old Testament, since that would be like ridiculing an earthquake. But I will make some points that relate directly to this blog post. To start with, in the first ten or so books of the Old Testament, God creates a brutal regime for His Chosen People in which the death penalty is a constant threat. Meanwhile, all other people are essentially regarded as termites, as I have demonstrated in my other blog posts.
In my opinion, what's most important is that everyone's voice is heard. We all have different life experiences, and in the course of our lives we get wiser, but we also forget valuable perspectives that had at earlier points in our lives. Unfortunately, the voice of a fetus can not be heard, nor can the voice of a completely dysfunctional child. However, in absence of their opinion, I think women can usually gauge the needs and interests of their unborn children better than men can. So among the countries where abortion is near-impossible to obtain, there are four - Chile, Ireland, Malta and Andorra - that are functional democracies, two of which have had female leaders, but the rest are hopelessly undemocratic and have not in recent times given a substantive role to women in making national policy. Likewise, I don't think any of the popes or prophets had the experience of knowing they would die before the age of five. And most of us don't really remember what our own position was on these issues back when we were sperm. I think many of us developed a sort of existential attitude after witnessing 250-500 million sperm - from the same ejaculation - fail to find an egg that would sustain them. And fortunately, anyone wicked enough to be HIV-positive at birth is not likely to become a politician, much less a clergyman, so these people rarely have any direct influence over religious doctrine or public policy. Likewise, people in the later stages of cancer are rarely making the rules. In fact, the last few popes all died rather quick deaths. The last one to die of cancer was Pope John XXIII, in 1963, who died from stomach cancer within about 8 months of diagnosis. Before him, Pope Pius XII died a long, slow death that lasted from 1954-1958. During this time he was rarely seen outside his room, and was generally inactive in decision making. If he had opted for euthanasia, this would have been an abrupt break from a near-universal norm in the West. It's a recent phenomenon that people live long enough for cancer to get the cancers that are common now, and it's even more recent that we can prolong people's lives when they're dying of cancer or other fatal diseases. So before 1958, there were only two countries where euthanasia or "physician-assisted suicide" were practiced legally: Switzerland and UK.
I started thinking about this really seriously in seventh grade. Our reading teacher discussed assisted suicide within the context of Dr. Jack Kevorkian. This discussion took place during the trial that would land Kevorkian in prison for eight years. At this time Oregon was the only state that had legalized assisted suicide. I won't pretend that my knowledge of the 1994 Oregon Death With Dignity Act didn't come from Wikipedia just now:
Under the law, a capable adult Oregon resident who has been diagnosed, by a physician, with a terminal illness that will kill the patient within six months may request in writing, from his or her physician, a prescription for a lethal dose of medication for the purpose of ending the patient's life. Exercise of the option under this law is voluntary and the patient must initiate the request. Any physician, pharmacist or healthcare provider who has moral objections may refuse to participate.The request must be confirmed by two witnesses, at least one of whom is not related to the patient, is not entitled to any portion of the patient's estate, is not the patient's physician, and is not employed by a health care facility caring for the patient. After the request is made, another physician must examine the patient's medical records and confirm the diagnosis. The patient must be determined to be free of a mental condition impairing judgment. If the request is authorized, the patient must wait at least fifteen days and make a second oral request before the prescription may be written. The patient has a right to rescind the request at any time. Should either physician have concerns about the patient's ability to make an informed decision, or feel the patient's request may be motivated by depression or coercion, the patient must be referred for a psychological evaluation.The law protects doctors from liability for providing a lethal prescription for a terminally ill, competent adult in compliance with the statute's restrictions. Participation by physicians, pharmacists, and health care providers is voluntary. The law also specifies a patient's decision to end his or her life shall not "have an effect upon a life, health, or accident insurance or annuity policy."
Since this time, two other states have legalized assisted suicide. Washington, in 2008 passed, the Washington Death With Dignity Act is more or less identical to it's predecessor. In Montana, in 2009, the state Supreme Court ruled in Baxter v Montana that assisted suicide was not fundamentally in conflict with any preexisting court precedent or legislative statute. However, no law has been passed since then in Montana that would effectively put assisted suicide into practice. And I want to emphasize: the Oregon and Washington laws require that the patient be a state resident, so a resident of California could not simply be flied in and legally be laid to rest. However, there is another solution. Switzerland has been a site of "death tourism" for a long time because it allows assisted suicide, and does not require the patients to be Swiss nationals. Switzerland also does not require the suicide to be administered by a physician, although I, personally, would do my utmost to avoid taking advantage of this loophole. Some of us have the experience of watching someone consuming hundreds of thousands of dollars in healthcare, just so this person can forcibly spend two or three years bedridden, meanwhile in immense pain. Among people in this situation, a small fraction has the opportunity to end their lives via a "living will." When I learned about living wills in seventh grade, I made sure to write one right away and stuff it into my sock drawer, since I knew that life takes us by surprise. I will not discuss living wills because I am not knowledgeable enough about the nitty-gritty legal matters. However, it seems clear that most Americans are advocates, even if many would not say so openly. Popular support among patients has been confirmed by studies published in the journals Anasthesia and Medical Decision Making.
So should we should ask why a human life is so important that we should spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for each year that we prolong the life of someone who can't even speak, and has already lived to a ripe old age. Some people interpret the Bible (for example, in Romans 5 and John 1) as saying that Jesus demonstrated the importance of human life by dying for us. But what if these people are wrong? The Bible also makes an ambitious claim that our lives are more important than the lives of, say, potatoes or lethal bacteria. But what if the Bible is wrong about that? Consider this: among Americans with bipolar disorder, such as me, one in six commits suicide. In mental health discourse, suicide is considered unacceptable in any circumstance. But does that mean it's irrational? Suicide is the only way of controlling one's death. Bipolar disorder often makes people unemployable, so suicide is often a calculated decision to prevent an imminent death caused by several years of withering away from homelessness. And it can prevent multiple times more grief from occurring to the same person's family. Suicide is the only guaranteed way of preventing oneself from dying a humiliating death, and from engaging in humiliating actions that would otherwise be part of the natural course of things. When homeless, people will do all kinds of things that do not improve their reputation, and that they would have no reason or desire to do otherwise - they steal, they rape (since it's difficult for a man to seduce a woman if he can't shower), they have public sex with other homeless people (who are overwhelmingly male) and with street prostitutes, they acquire and disseminate the STDs that are heavily concentrated among homeless people and street prostitutes, they abuse drugs or alcohol as a way of coping with their many discomforts, they sell drugs, have vicious fights with other degenerates that can involve killing, they harass strangers with the hope of receiving money, they gossip and get gossiped about by other homeless people, they leave a strong, enduring stench wherever they go, they urinate, defecate, vomit and get drunk and high in public places; and, alas, they commit suicide. Even an Andy Griffith at the start of homelessness will inevitable acquire habits within a few years that are less-than-upright. And by living this lifestyle for ten years, homeless people might consume several hundred thousand dollars worth of drugs, alcohol and tobacco, space in shelters when available, subsidized housing when available (sporadic in most cases), emergency room treatment, rehabilitation and physical therapy, food, places to use public bathrooms, prison or jail space, clothing, street prostitutes, items acquired by theft, attention from social workers - things that come from someone's wallet one way or another, but not from a legitimate job.
Personally, when I was in college suicide was constantly on my mind. With the help of some older-than-21s, I would keep alcohol stocked up in my dorm, and on a few occasions I held binge drinking sessions on my own - one with vodka, one with gin, one with elderberry wine, and one with homemade martinis, including the olive. The routine was always the same: quickly drink as much as possible, exit the room, wander around campus acting rash and indecent, collapse wherever, invariably vomiting somewhere along the way. I committed this act four times - three times before I was expelled for it and once after starting up at another school. This strange habit was, of course, an act of impulse. However, it was motivated by a strong sentiment that I felt very, very intimately and that was of immediate relevance at the time. This was a set of thoughts that were only vaguely formulated, and never materialized in the form of speech. I was terrified by my future prospects, but not as terrified as I should have been. And misfortune can strike us at any moment - especially if you're crazy, and there are many reasons for that. And all the omens around me told me I was securely on track to become unemployable and incapable of living a normal life. And life has no limits to how cruel it can be. So when I was in college, my drinking binges were half-intended to prevent myself from living a terrible life later on. Later in college I became more explicitly interested in suicide. I spilled the beans about this newfound idea, and within a few months I was hospitalized. My medication regime was thus initiated, and with some incremental adjustments over the years, it would become the best thing to have happened to my in my adult life. When released from inpatient treatment I was prescribed Geodon, a low-intensity medication, and meanwhile I was experiencing a several-month-long depressive episode that was blunted by the medication but was still burdensome. I was talking my problems over with Phil, a young guy unaffiliated with the university, whom I considered my only friend, but whom I would later learn was lying about his life experiences to win respect from marginalized students so that we could buy him things to supplement the money he received from his parents. I told Phil of my interest in committing suicide. He responded whatever ways he knew of. He told me suicide is selfish, and cowardly, then he gave me the familiar cliche that it's a "permanent solution to a temporary problem" (I doubt it's usually true). He ask if I had any siblings. I told him I had a brother, and he responded "wouldn't your brother be shocked to find out you committed suicide?" The answer came to me instantaneously: "He'd definitely pretend to be. Yeah, he'd definitely at least pretend to be." After this conversation, he convinced me that suicide was not the right move, and since then I have never considered suicide, discouraged by the psychological harm that it would do to others.
And that takes us to the beginning. Does life have any intrinsic value, or do we merely hate it when people die, especially people close to us, and especially when they die young? Western value systems have tried to attach a teleological significance to human life; we've all heard that "to save a life is to save the world." That's why we're all haunted, every waking moment, by the fact that every year malaria kills a million children younger than five. I think this little axiom has some serious flaws, as do all normative principles. The United States would never have never become so powerful and capable if the 19th century presidents had to negotiate with the Native Americans. And if abortions weren't readily available in China, India, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and a plethora of other lower or middle income countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, then we'd be complaining about the exploding populations of countries sucking up limited natural resources (e.g. water), going to war over these natural resources, destroying forests and grasslands to make room for their expanding populations, releasing untold amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, causing any number of severe environmental problems with their infrastructure projects and inefficient farms and golf courses, creating wayward youths who were raised by a hopeless single mother because their fathers conceived unintentionally without making a commitment, requiring billions of our tax dollars for humanitarian aid, allowing millions of their own people to die in famines ... a perfect Malthusian scenario. But instead, the fastest growing economies in the world are almost exclusively those of very poor countries, most of them in Africa. Granted, in rich countries we are threatened with a reverse-Malthusian scenario. That is, our fertility rates might be too low to produce enough workers to support us in the future. Sure. But one cause of this problem is that in previous generations - comprising the present and future retirees - the fertility rates were too high (I think China is in grave danger because the shift was especially dramatic there). Also, of course, children with AIDS or neural tube defects or who are destined for infanticide will not become a net asset.
Again: we hate seeing people die, but when they're fetuses their deaths do not disturb us in the same way. The same is true when they're sperm. That's an evolved instinct. Unlike other mammals, humans only give birth to one child at a time. Also unlike other mammals, our children are completely helpless for the first couple years of their lives. And furthermore, we are unlike most any other animal in that childbirth is a long, gruesome process involving excruciating pain. The experiences of pregnancy and childbirth also tend to nurture a sense of attachment in the woman's male partner that is not common among most mammals. As a result, other mammals are not nearly as bothered so see their children die get stolen by a predator, whereas to humans this is unthinkable, even though in many countries people are accustomed to seeing half of their children die during early childhood. Does this evolved idiosyncrasy make our lives more valuable than other animals' lives? I would say yes, because it's one of many things that makes us more capable than other animals. But it doesn't mean that we necessarily need to live. It just means that we need to protect the lives that are already here - unless, I guess, we don't happen to care about the lives at stake. When it comes down to it, what matters is whether we happen to care. Some people have tried to extrapolate from this instinct to make doctrines that were broader in scope, but they tend to be ludicrous, and it's easy to see when they break down. Personally I am an advocate of Rawlsian social justice, but only because I like it. When it comes down to it, if a nuclear war occurred that killed every last person on earth, then when it finished no one would care, not even the Pope. However, for all the flaws in the prevailing Western moral systems, I respect those who do their utmost to live up to their ideals. They are very rare, though. Estimates of the number of people who masturbate vary quite widely, but by most estimates more than 90 percent of men masturbate at some point in their lives, in addition to more than 60 percent of women. Some would argue that men who masturbate regularly over the course of their lives are killing trillions of people (remember: 250-500 million sperm per ejaculation). However, those who never masturbate or use contraception but try to procreate are killing billions of people rather than trillions. Those who never masturbate or have sex, but have wet dreams during their adolescence are not killing anyone by their own deliberate actions. Those who never masturbate or have sex or wet dreams or even have relationships with the opposite sex, but molest boys, are not killing anyone, and are only doing harm to a handful of people. I think we have a winner.
