I am always awestruck with the workings of Creation.
Drip, Drip, Drip … Is the overturning Of Roe the final drip that causes the collapse, or more appropriately the overturning of the bucket of the American experiment birthed in 1776.
The Meaning of Pro-Life in America
Abortion was legal when America was founded.
Pro-life as it is used today is, in reality, selective life. The male-dominated church and institutions are focused not on life—that is, all life—but on con[1]trolling women’s bodies through fear, dogma, rules, and regulations. The illusion presented is the concern about life, but not all life, just the life of the fetus. For pro-lifers there is no choice for a woman to abort after becoming pregnant through rape, as it is “something God intended.” An example of pro-life being selective life is that it is God sanctioned and OK to kill an abortion doctor or nurse, but aborting a fetus is murder.
Pro-life is totally focused on the fetus, not the welfare and life of the child after he or she is born—another form of hypocrisy. As I stated in the introduction, today, if you evoke the name of Jesus, then you better believe in and promote social justice and a culture and society of unity, freedom, equality, choice, and an egalitarian way of life. If you do not, then you are a hypocrite.
What was Jesus’s view on this issue? Even though he was a religious revolutionary whose radical ideas threatened the male-dominated society, religious and secular, Jesus was still Jewish, and Jewish law states that life begins at birth. Additionally, there are no specific prohibitions of abortion in the Bible. Jesus taught that the kingdom of God is within us. It is then up to us to perfect our kingdom. This perfection does not come from an institution’s rules and regulations, religious or secular, but from our own conscious choices in life. We can awaken to our kingdom or follow others as blind, fearful sheep. It is our choice to be compassionate and help others less fortunate or to be controlling and dominating, enforcing rules and regulations that many times only serve a select few, mainly the ruling elite—secular and religious. Jesus, on the other hand, followed the natural law of God, not laws or rules that dominated others and forced circumstances on them that they did not choose or would choose. Finally, pro-life versus pro-choice is dualistic thinking. Jesus brought a message of radical nondualism—in Jesus’s mind pro-life is pro-choice.
Pro-Life Is Pro-Choice
Being pro-life, and this means all life, even down to the smallest ant, does not mean that we are not pro-choice. In fact, the reality is that being pro-life makes us pro-choice. Believing that all things are alive, responsive, and intrinsically important and precious, we determine our actions and behaviors, words, and thoughts totally based on this most basic, but important, paradigm of life. This is a paradigm of life that encompasses choice and power. Yes, power—empowerment. Self-power based on our belief in the divineness that is within us as well as within all other things of creation. This is true faith, not the hollow faith of the church. If we have the power within, we do not need religious or secular institutions telling us what to think and what choices to make—especially if it concerns our bodies. For women, pro-life as pro-choice presents a different view of abortion, one based on common sense and love, not fear and guilt.
We know that the question of when soulful human life begins is the source of the conflict between pro-choice and pro-life. It is also one of the greatest human spiritual and religious mysteries. And because it is a mystery, it cannot be proven one way or the other. On the other hand, even a mystery such as this may still have some light shed on it. However, the church would rather keep you ignorant and in the dark. Christianity’s dogma states that the soul enters at conception, while Judaism believes that ensoulment occurs at birth.
Jewish law not only permits, but in some circumstances requires abortion. Where the mother’s life is in jeopardy because of the unborn child, abortion is mandatory.
An unborn child has the status of “potential human life” until the majority of the body has emerged from the mother. Potential human life is valuable, and may not be terminated casually, but it does not have as much value as a life in existence. The Talmud makes no bones about this: it says quite bluntly that if the fetus threatens the life of the mother, you cut it up within her body and remove it limb by limb if necessary, because its life is not as valuable as hers. But once the greater part of the body has emerged, you cannot take its life to save the mother’s, because you cannot choose between one human life and another.
Since ensoulment is a spiritual and religious mystery, where can we turn to discover some truth? It seems that common sense, as well as biblical teachings, may provide us with the key to the contentious issue of when soulful human life begins. The key is breath. Have you ever seen or felt a baby’s first breath of life? Have you ever heard a baby’s initial cry—the soul’s cry of life? Have you ever looked into the eyes of a newborn baby and seen that spark of life? And have you ever viewed a person that has died—passed over—and recognized the absence or lack of breath and that spark? At the moment of our first breath, the divine spark, pure and untainted (no sin, no metaphoric dirt), entered us from the heavens.
Have you ever experienced near drowning? Have you ever choked on a piece of roast beef or a pretzel? As a child have you ever competed with a friend to see who could hold his or her breath the longest? And when you could finally breathe again, no matter what the circumstances, that initial gasp of air, that precious handhold of life, was the sweetest moment you could experience. I know this to be true, as I have choked on a piece of roast beef and a pretzel and was unable to breathe until my dear wife dislodged both. During and after graduate school, I was also a lifeguard and saved three people from drowning. I knew and felt their terror when they could not breathe and that sweet moment when they took their first breath. I was at the birth of my daughter and held her as she took her first breath and screamed her announcement of arrival to the whole world.
I know by experience the fact and truth that breath is life. Inversely, the lack of breath is death. In all cultures breath was accorded a special place within their spiritual and philosophical traditions. In the Hebrew Tanaka, the word ruach is translated as “divine wind, breath, or spirit.” “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” In other words, it is a striking image of “an apparently lifeless body being slowly revived by artificial respiration. God himself breathes the breath of life into the first human being. For all his earthy substance, man has something divine about him.”
To native Hawaiians, “the living human being as a foetus is not considered a ‘live’ person until birth when the kino (corporeal body) breathes (hanu) the ‘air’ (ea) of the god(s), so that the material body quicken with the ‘spirit’ (ea) of the universe in the ‘breath’ (ha) of the human being as it ingests the atmosphere (ea) of ‘god.’ Abortion of the nonbreathing foetus is thus not considered deprivation of life inasmuch as ‘life’ (ea) is a condition of the ‘spirit’ (ea) and requires the ability to breathe (ha) in the god’s breath. To be a full, living personality there must be corporeal life (ola), spiritual life (‘uhane), the soul personality (kino wailua) and breath (ha).”
And finally, the first line of the Lord’s Prayer in Jesus’s original tongue of Aramaic is “Avvon d-bish-maiya”— “thou art, from whom the breath of life comes.
Ironically, but still a glimmer of light within some who consider themselves Christians, the following is excerpted from the website TheChristianLeft.org in support of ensoulment at birth, not at conception: According to the bible, a fetus is not a living person with a soul until after drawing its first breath.
After God formed man in Genesis 2:7, He “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and it was then that the man became a living being.” Although the man was fully formed by God in all respects, he was not a living being until after taking his first breath.
In Job 33:4, it states: “The spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life.”
Again, to quote Ezekiel 37:5&6, “Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.”
According to the bible, destroying a living fetus does not equate to killing a living human being even though the fetus has the potential of becoming a human being. One cannot kill something that has not been born and taken a breath.
There is nothing in the bible to indicate that a fetus is considered to be anything other than living tissue and, according to scripture, it does not become a living being until after it has taken a breath.
One last point, the fetus is a potential human being, not a separate, soulful life. Of course, it is alive and receiving the essence of the mother as well as the genetic or the earthly lineages of both the mother and father—a potential human being. But it is still not a soulful human being. The mother and the fetus are alive but are not two separate, soulful lives. Thus, the loss of the potential baby, in my estimation, although I am not a woman, is one of the greatest losses outside of losing an actual child that a woman may experience during her lifetime, either through abortion miscarriage or stillbirth. I am not equating abortion with miscarriage and stillbirth. Abortion is a choice; miscarriage and stillbirth are the sufferings and struggles of life happening. And I believe that there is not enough help and support in our male-dominated society for women to heal from this loss (if they can actually ever totally heal).
In my mind, the conscious choice to abort a fetus is the hardest and greatest choice a woman must face in life. But again, it is a choice. The woman is not killing or taking a human soulful life. She is losing a part of herself and a potential child. This loss is great, and it needs to be mourned and then healed—not only the loss itself but also any guilt or sadness. If there is anything lacking in legalized abortions, it is the absence of comprehensive emotional and spiritual healing after the abortion.