Pro Life Deconstructed

Years ago I read about indigenous women in Guatemala who use a poison plant to abort an unwanted pregnancy. This is something they have done for many centuries, and apparently was a secret they kept from their husbands, who, like men everywhere, would tend to disapprove.
This is instructive, or at least should be. Women have been aborting pregnancies ever since there have been humans, and likely well into pre-human stages of evolution. It became "murder" because of religion. It almost doesn’t matter which religion. They all believe they have the answers to life, and make rules for people to follow. The key factor is the degree of patriarchy and its accompanying authoritarianism.

The religion I grew up in, Roman Catholicism, is the most patriarchal and authoritarian of Christian religions, with a single ruler, the Pope, and a descending hierarchy of men all the way down to the local parish priest. There isn’t much point in being authoritarian if you don’t make enforceable rules for the faithful to follow, and making abortion a "mortal" sin is perfect for keeping women in line. When you commit a mortal sin you go to "Hell" after death – unless, of course you repent, beg forgiveness and do some kind of penance, as determined by an authority – a priest, who is by Roman "canon" always a man.

Other Christian religions have been more flexible and ambiguous regarding abortion, but many have fallen into line with authoritarianism and patriarchy, depending on the degree of fanaticism and political alignment. The "Republican" party has worked symbiotically with extreme Christian groups through demagoguery, scapegoating and repressive laws. Until last week these efforts have mostly been thwarted upon appeal because of the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Roe versus Wade, giving women the right to an abortion for any reason.

Then, on June 24 the latest iteration of the Supreme Court reversed the 1972 decision, and in its majority opinion said the legality of abortion is up to individual states. In a way, this was a perfect decision. This version of the Supreme Court is illegitimate for a number of reasons, which I wrote about previously. An illegitimate court made an illegitimate decision, based on religious prejudice – five of the six justices voting in the majority are Catholics, and the sixth is a former Catholic, now an Episcopalian - a schism religion that is almost Catholic, just no pope. The Episcopal Church was part of the Church of England, but separated after the American revolution. The Church of England separated from Catholicism in 1534 when the pope refused to give King Henry VIII an annulment of his marriage. He had two later wives beheaded. Some religion.

At least two of the justices lied under oath during their nomination hearings, and are both verifiable sexual predators. The wife of one of the lying under oath sexual predators was involved in the January 6 insurrection. Five of them were appointed by presidents who gained office by voter suppression, collusion with a foreign power to influence voters, and through other election chicanery. One was appointed after the "Republican" majority in the U.S. Senate refused to hold hearings for "Democratic" president Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland.

This is all pretty common knowledge, but necessary to mention when looking at the abortion question. The Christian religions behind anti-abortion efforts are all fake, created by men, and with the underlying mission of controlling people, threatening them with eternal damnation, and sometimes killing them in order to exert their authority. Jesus Christ, the mythical God in human form and focus of worship, never existed, but that doesn’t matter to "Christians." All that matters is believing he existed, or at least pretending to believe. "Serving" him has been the justification of countless wars, tortures, imprisonments, beheadings, burning at the stake, banishments and various forms of disparagement over the centuries, so why stop now?

Deconstructing the U.S. Supreme Court and Christianity are fairly easy pickings. What might be useful at this point is to deconstruct the modern philosophical principle, or more accurately slogan, of the antiabortion movement known as "pro-life." To be opposed to abortion is to be pro-life, as if the other "side" is anti-life. It is essentially a semantic argument. It takes the word life to mean a specific thing – the developing potential human during the nine-month gestation period from conception to birth. A biologically conceived embryo grows into human form over this nine-month period, and then is expelled in birth, the time at which a distinct, viable person is welcomed into the world. Or not, depending on individual circumstances. Welcome is a very relative and ambiguous term.

Pro-lifers contend that the embryo is a live human, and to end a pregnancy at any time after conception is killing a baby. The word life is appropriated to mean fetal life. In actuality, the word life means much more. It applies to all biological life, including animal, plant, bacterial, viral and fungal. To truly be pro life would mean being in favor of the existence and continuation of life on this planet.

I also believe that the term life includes much more than biological life. How about the rest of the Universe beyond our limited planetary understanding? A myriad of fantastic galaxies exist outside the one in which our relatively small solar system operates. Is what goes on in motion in all these galaxies limited to our narrow view of what it means to be alive? So arrogant.

Then there is the problem of independence, of distinctness of the gestating potential human. If an embryo is life, then a kidney should also be life. Or a heart, a liver, a pancreas, a lung, a brain, a bladder and a colon. There are two differences with pregnancy. One, of course, is that the gestating potential person is in the process of becoming a new person. The other is that this development process can be reversed or ended due to a variety of circumstances, including disease or other illness of the mother, trauma, accident, and, of course, abortion.

Ultimately, the process of human reproduction is biological, something humans didn’t invent, but which we share with all other forms of life on this planet. To make rules governing something we didn’t invent is to impose the values and authority of civilization – of mass society – over the life process. In the U.S., it has come down to the authority of crackpot religion and an illegitimate and criminal judicial overseer. It can only be enforced through further fanaticism and criminality. It won’t last, especially in the context of life-threatening climate change and the unsustainability of our infinite-growth economic system. No phony Supreme Court can control these inevitabilities. A real one might try, but even that would be too little, too late. Most likely is that the entire system will abort.

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When Trump nominee and sexual predator Brett Kavanaugh testified under oath before the U.S. Senate in 2018, I wrote this.

Here's a song. Vintage George Carlin. Johnny Cash. 

Here's one for Cassidy Hutchinson. Here's another. Stephen Colbert had some fun with her testimony. She answered this question from the January 6 committee with eloquence, courage and great truth. 

The Supreme Court is at it again. This song is for Donald Trump. This song is for the "Republican" party. Bob Marley, always inspiring. Frank Zappa.

Sometimes I write things that appear elsewhere, such as this. And this. Most recently, this. Here's one from last year. 

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Update, July 29, 2022: Here's a quick analysis of the Supreme Court's phony theory of "Originalism."

Update, September 2: The NPR program Science Friday aired a discussion of when life begins.

Getting Off The Treadmill

It might be helpful when studying the proliferation of mass shootings to look at them in context. There are two components. Mass and shooting. As we evolved from lower forms of life we organized in ever-more-complex organizations, from families to hunter-gatherer groups to tribes to towns, cities, nations and international alliances. 

People organize in occupational specialties, by employment, through religion, political belief, recreational interests, by gender, and by sexual orientation. There are so many kinds of masses that any and all of them are vulnerable to attack.

Then there is the shooting. First, we evolved the use of tools. Then came crude tools of violence – rocks, clubs, then spears, bows and arrows, swords, lances, hatchets, clubs, catapults and vats of boiling oil.

Then came the gun – pistol, rifle and shotgun; the cannon, the bomb, the missile and the mine, both land and sea. As humans became more sophisticated in implements of destruction, the weapons became more complex, enabling the killing of ever-greater numbers of people in shorter amounts of time. The entire human species can be eliminated by just one nuclear bomb.

The combination of ever-increasing ways for humans to organize in masses with ever-more complex and deadly implements of destruction make for a toxic mix of cosmic proportions. One guy – always a guy – can kill hundreds of people with an AR-15 equipped with a "bump" stock. The gun is perfectly legal in America, though the sale of bump stocks is limited in some states. If you already have one, hmm, don’t use it.

Supposedly the reason it is legal to own an AR-15 is that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says it is our "right." It is legal all over this country to own a weapon whose sole purpose is to kill people because of a phony interpretation of the Second Amendment. There is no individual right to own a gun of any kind. As stated in the Second Amendment, the right rests on the notion formed early in our nation’s history, that in order to form a well-armed militia, blah, blah, blah.

This argument is well-formed elsewhere, so it would be needlessly redundant to re-invent it. What I would add, though, is that it is madness to have millions of people in a society armed to the teeth with weapons of mass destruction. The AR-15 is a weapon of mass destruction, misinterpreted Second Amendment or no misinterpreted Second Amendment. We are a country that doesn’t know its elbow from a hole in the ground, and, by extension, everything in between. We are lucky we know how to breathe, when to defecate, urinate, eat, drink and when to call it a day. A mass shooting is what the military calls "asymmetric warfare" – the few, or one, killing the many. If we have enough of them only the few will be left, and they will have no one left to shoot but each other.

There is one more factor to consider. When people are concentrated in mass groupings and organizations they often need to act as a unit in order to get things done effectively. The way this is normally done is to choose a leader. This can be done by acclamation, appointment, heredity, physical size, or democratically. Or, power can be seized, as was attempted by our former president a year-and-a-half ago.

However power is attained, it tends to become entrenched. Gaining power is one thing, but keeping it, or the obsession with keeping it, can lead to corruption. A perfect example is the U.S. Congress – both "houses." Incumbents have a built-in advantage, because they can raise money from powerful business and other interests to finance propaganda efforts. The presidency is also a concentration of power that depends greatly on money in “election” and "reelection."

Money doesn’t talk, it swears, as Bob Dylan once put it. The president appoints the justices of the Supreme Court, giving them lifetime appointments – amplifying the power of the president, and to some degree the Senate, which has the power of approval the appointments.

This is the final ingredient in mass shootings. We have a mass society. We have the lethal technology to kill masses of people. And we have a corrupt leadership system, which enables gun manufacturers and ownership zealots to pay and threaten legislators, presidents and other public officials in a feedback loop whereby these politicians then profess belief in the sanctity of gun ownership and manufacture. We are stuck in madness.

Is there a way out of this mess? Yes. Time. Taking a systems approach, which I do whenever possible, I see mass shooting in a broader context. The Polar ice caps are melting. They will melt completely. Industrial, capitalist, infinite-growth human civilization is incapable of stopping this trajectory. The prospect of reversing the relentless advance of climate change and its warming of the planet is always placed as a secondary priority to infinite growth of output of production of goods and services. This infinite growth is antithetical to reversing the effects of climate change, so on we go. One we go, that is, until it finally goes bust. Add in the inevitability of human stupidity, like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the denouement is guaranteed to happen even sooner.

The advance of human civilization has been going on ever since we became a species. We are now at the apex. It has gone as far as it can, and now is in the process of self-destruction. Like an addict, the human species is on a treadmill that it can’t stop or get off from. Unless it hits bottom, recognizes its addiction, and goes into treatment and recovery. It is unlikely that we can do this, but the choice is clear. Get off the treadmill or die. All of us.

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Here's a song.

This story tells how the AR-15 became so popular.

Here's a look at the "good guy with a gun" meme.

This is an example of the kind of people who oppose any restraints on their "freedom."