Philosophical Musings and Ruminations - To Abort or Not to Abort?

A debate has been going on from a long time now....whether abortion should be legal or illegal; it goes to even deeper discussion of whether it is moral or immoral? The most heated dialectic has been going on in the western hemisphere; between the "Pro-Lifers" and the atheists.

There was a time when the lines seemed clearer and the slogans said everything. Pro-lifers were Jesus-loving Pope-followers with a passion for sticking rosaries on ovaries, and atheists were quick to respond with “Keep your theology off my biology!”

But recently, the lines have begun to blur with advent of Pro-life or Humanist Atheists, who along with shunning the presence of God also embrace the sanctity of Human race and derive their morality from it. Atheist and civil libertarian journalist Nat Hentoff said that “Being without theology isn’t the slightest hindrance to being pro-life.” Atheist philosophy professor Don Marquis declared abortion is “immoral” because it denies developing fetuses “a future like ours.” Robert M. Price, author of books like “Jesus is Dead” and “The Case Against the Case for Christ”, called abortion “second-degree murder” Well, at least we still have the “Four Horsemen” safely in our ranks, right? Not quite. Even our beloved Christopher Hitchens considered “the occupant of the womb as a candidate member of society.” He also argued that “the unborn entity has a right on its side” and identified himself as involved with the pro-life movement.

But many people have a hard time understanding why an atheist might be pro-life. Well, here are my responses to some of their more common objections :

"It doesn’t matter whether or not the fetus is a human being, because women have bodily autonomy rights and no human can have non-consensual access to her body."

Well not so fast. If the fetus is not a human being with his/her own bodily rights, it’s true that infringing on a woman’s body by placing restrictions on her medical options is always a gross injustice and a violation. On the other hand, if we are talking about two human beings who should each be entitled to their own bodily rights, in the unique situation that is pregnancy, we aren’t justified in following the route of might-makes-right simply because we can. Bigger and older humans don’t necessarily trump younger and more dependent humans. Rights must always be justified and ethically grounded lest they become a tool of tyranny.

Before we address the question of bodily autonomy in pregnancy, let’s meet the second player. What does science tell us that the preborn are? To be clear, science doesn’t define personhood. It never could. Science can’t tell us whether it’s wrong to rape women, torture children, enslave black people, or which physical traits should or should not matter when it comes to determining personhood. Science may be able to measure suffering in living creatures, but it can’t tell us why or if their suffering should matter. However, science can tell us who among us belongs to the human species.

When it comes to normal human reproduction, sperm and ovum merge to form a new whole. They cease to exist individually and become a new substance that is not the mother and not the father but a new body altogether, one that is also human and has the inherent capacity to develop through all stages of development. As Christopher Hitchens aptly said:

“The original embryonic “blastocyst” may be a clump of 64 to 200 cells that is only five days old. But all of us began our important careers in that form, and every needful encoding for life is already present in the apparently inchoate. We are the first generation to have to confront this as a certain knowledge.
”

"But embryos and fetuses can’t be our equals — they’re not fully developed yet! They aren’t self aware or sentient! They can’t survive on their own!"

Well, of course they can’t. But why isn’t a fetus self-aware or sentient? Why hasn’t an embryo developed a functioning brain or the capacity to breathe on its own? Isn’t it merely because she or he is younger? Isn’t that just the way human beings at their age and stage naturally develop and function? While we wouldn’t give our car keys to toddlers on account of their current capacities, neither would we kill them for not having reached a developmental milestone yet. If we deny personhood and justify the death of a fetus simply because he or she has not developed to the point of sentience yet, that makes abortion the deadliest form of age discrimination.

When we talk about rights and personhood, we leave the realm of science for that of philosophy and ethics. History is ripe with examples of real biological human beings whose societies arbitrarily decided they didn’t qualify as equals, on account of criteria deemed morally relevant. At one point (and still, in many ways, today), it was skin color, gender, and ethnic background. Now, we can add to that list consciousness, sentience, and viability. We haven’t evolved so fast in 50 years as to be immune from tribalistic us vs. them thinking. If science defines a fetus as a biological member of our species, is it possible that our society is just as wrong in denying them personhood?

Furthermore, if self-awareness is to be the dividing line, anyone unconscious or in a coma might not be considered a person, while those in a heightened state of awareness due to drugs would trump the rest of us. If we determine that the ability to suffer and feel pain is what counts, then any born person with Congenital Insensitivity to Pain can be stripped of equal rights and killed. If higher brain function or a greater degree of health are what matter, then anyone with a higher IQ or a greater longevity and health than your own should be free to decide that your unfortunate quality of life makes your existence not worth continuing. Only the pro-life position — that all human beings should be granted the common right to continue their lives as human persons, regardless of their age, stage, gender, sexual orientation, race, or physical form and abilities — is truly egalitarian and fair for all human beings.


"But so what? Even if the unborn are human beings worthy of personhood even in their earliest stage of development, under normal circumstances, no one has a right to use someone else’s body against their consent."

This is true. And, likewise, under normal circumstances no one should be killed for being too young to care for themselves independently. Unfortunately, pregnancy is completely unlike any normal circumstances or normal human relationship. What happens when both a woman and her developing fetus are regarded as human beings entitled to personhood and bodily rights? Any way you cut it, their rights are always going to conflict (at least until womb transfers become a reality). So what’s the reasonable response? It could start by treating both parties at conflict as if they were equal human beings.


Human society has determined that parents have an obligation to nourish and protect their dependent offspring. The more vulnerable and dependent someone is, the more we are obligated to not abandon them. That a fetus is singularly dependent on one woman for the duration of nine months is not an argument for abortion, but against it. If an unrelated infant were abandoned on your doorstep miles from civilization with no one in a position to reach you and release you of your charge, would you not be obligated to at least provide basic life-sustaining care until such a time as care could be passed on to another person? Would this not be true even though you did not consent to the arrival of the dependent human, who was in fact forced upon you? Would you be any less obligated to try to keep this child alive if doing so was wearisome and taxing on your body, though not life-threateningly so? If this is true of one’s duty to sustain a vulnerable and dependent stranger until care can be passed on to another, how much more obligated is a woman to her own prenatal offspring?

And there you have an introduction to an abortion debate that is void of Bibles, popes, and rosaries. I realize that this brief secular case against abortion undoubtedly raises as many questions as it has answered. After all, if we make abortion illegal, won’t that make them more dangerous for women? Do we believe women who have abortions should face jail sentences? Should fetuses be counted in the census, and if so, what happens when a woman miscarries? Are we trying to put a stop to the work of Planned Parenthood and other women’s clinics? Can we grant fetuses rights without endangering and hurting the lives of women? Indeed, no one wants to see women injured or harmed in a dangerous illegal abortion! And therein lies a conversation that a civilized society must have if we are to truly treat every member of our species with equality. Can we legally condone one human being killing another human being because one might otherwise risk her life and health to do so? Or are there better ways to address the problems that drive so many countless women to feel they have no choice but abortion? To adequately deconstruct these concerns would require lengthy articles unto themselves, which is why I hope this will be the beginning of ongoing dialogue amongst atheists on this matter.

Frederica Mathewes-Green once said “No woman wants an abortion as she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal caught in a trap wants to gnaw off its own leg.” Abortion advocates correctly perceive the trap, but they merely offer the woman a sterile knife to aid in the amputation. Real help does not sacrifice one human life at the expense of another but goes to the source of the trap to unscrew the hinge and free both.

If we all work together to come up with real choices for women — better birth control, better maternity leave, subsidized daycare, a living wage, flexible work schedules, better schooling options, more attractive open-adoption and temporary foster care options, etc. — abortion may roll itself into the world of obsolescence, regardless of its legal status.

That being said, if the pre-born are human members of our species and worthy of recognition as human persons, we have just as much of an obligation to protect them from the choices of other human beings and to ensure that violence against them is not legal and condoned.

I’m an atheist and I’m pro-life because some choices are wrong, violent, and unjust — and I want to do whatever I can to make abortion both unthinkable and unnecessary.

Philosophical Musings and Ruminations - Essays - On Shifting Lifestyles

A few months back, somewhere I saw a T-shirt with a joke on it. It was the classic British “Keep calm and carry on” insignia but with the crown inverted and the words changed to “Now panic and freak out.” I laughed out loud because it seemed a novel joke and sarcasm in the typical English style.

But not long after seeing it, I saw that image somewhere on Facebook, and soon after that I saw about one hundred different adaptations of it in a hundred different places. Within the course of probably weeks, something I encountered went from seeming unique and appealing to ubiquitous and cliche. This is the nature of contemporary culture. Nothing lasts very long.

If we add to this fast-paced cultural language two more aspects of modern life, the planned obsolescence of technology, and environmental awareness, it does not seem too surprising that the idea of a sharing economy might emerge. Things go out of style quickly, and they actually stop being usable as well. Given that, buying them just means you will have to throw them away before they wear out, which is wasteful.

One solution is to fight the trend, go back to the old-fashioned, longer lasting methods, avoid getting material things when it’s not necessary, and generally opt out of the modern economy. But an easier method, especially provided the capacity to organize which information technology can provide, is to just share access. Instead of each of us buying an item that will be obsolete or out of style, we can buy access to a collection and constantly trade in for something we haven’t used yet. We can create a public library of power tools, clothes, furniture and electronics. Although, eons away from Indian social landscape, countries like US, have Zipcar for transport or airbnb for hotels — both to cut costs and to increase convenience. But certainly the dream of this sharing economy appeals to many societies and cultures alike.

But it has skeptics as well. The two most common forms of criticism are from different angles, but boil down to the same issue: there are business people who say it won’t be possible to make money, and there are idealists who say that it is nothing but a cover for squeezing pennies from the consumer for every use.

The worry, then, is that it must be something capitalists are just going to exploit, (and this is proven by capitalists worrying over whether they’ll be able to exploit it). The outcome of understanding this so-called sharing as basically a form of micro-renting reveals that it can take away the lower class’s power by denying them ownership. Given this, the business world is perfectly happy to embrace what is essentially a new form of feudalism.

So is anything changing? Certainly the spread of information is far greater than in the past. Additionally, travel and movement is becoming more common, if not to the same degree in different social circles. These factors mean that there may be a shift in the importance placed on ownership. While at one time, the idea of property was rather directly identified with the owner (think of how the word is also used to refer to qualities), in a world so full of duplicates, what we are concerned with now is access.

When I leave my house, I make sure I have my phone, my wallet etc—all items that allow access to other things. Very little of it is unique property. If I lost these things, the annoyance would be getting my access back—new pieces of plastic or metal that could once again allow me have or provide various information. A shared economy seems a natural enough extension of that. Rather than carry a bike around, the modern consumer expects to have a card in the wallet or an app on the phone that allows access to bikes as needed.

Clearly most of us are not so nomadic as to be able to just create a new home every night, but at the same time the deepest roots will probably be where the most social activity takes place, and if that is through texts and posts as much as in living rooms, it may become easy to feel at home if one can get to Facebook or Twitter, with less need for a physical space that represents community. Perhaps what matters is who has got control of those domains. The classic concerns that public ownership is incompetent while private is too greedy and self-centered persist, and it is clear that the idea of a sharing economy isn't going to erase the issues that come with property. But the relationships might be changing nonetheless.

Philosophical Musings and Ruminations - Part Dos - On Swami Vivekananda's Speech

A few days back I came across Swami Vivekananda’s speech at Chicago of 1893 (the full speech). It was a pretty good speech. He talked a lot about the Hindu philosophy and the Vedic principles. Certainly, if I were there among his audience, I would have extolled his speech and venerated him for my life. I do respect him and his thoughts and I also respect the Hindu philosophy which he exalted at Chicago so beautifully. But as I read through it, I wondered whether it was correct to conclude that those thoughts were the final arguments for the existence of God. If it helps my case, even the Rig Veda, in the Nasadiya Sukta (Creation Hymn) has mentioned that question of a creator can’t be addressed. “Who knows whence came creation or whence the creator came. Whether the creator begot this creation or creation begot the creator.” (Not exactly accurate, since I write only what I can recollect, but the message is intact). When the originators of the philosophy are themselves skeptical, why shouldn't be we?

Although, I can't ratiocinate with the Vedic philosophy (which is his speech’s later half) because it is just a philosophy or a theory at best (like other theories e.g. relativity, evolution) and can’t be held as the ultimate truth, I wasn’t very much satisfied with his initial half. I have picked up the relevant lines from the speech and tried to answer them to the best of my ability.

Then, if there was a time when nothing existed, where was all this manifested energy? – The laws of physics as we know hold true only within our universe, one can’t calculate anything outside and before our universe based on the present laws of physics, classical or quantum. One can’t and shouldn’t comment on anything unknown. Even if one comments, one shouldn’t try to fill that gap with the God rhetoric.

Everything mutable is a compound, and everything compound must undergo that change which is called destruction. So God would die, which is absurd. Therefore there never was a time when there was no creation. – First off, he asserts that God dying is an absurd phenomenon and hence rejects it as impossibility. Even accepting his predisposition, he says that it is possible for things to have no beginning at all, like the Vedas and the soul. So if there never was a beginning, we wouldn’t require a beginner or creator, hence no point of existence of god. If he didn’t create us then he holds no authority over us.

Argument about the Ontology of Thought - When he talks about monism, he evokes a very wide and contested dialectic that has been going on since the time of Socrates. The arguments of monism which he uses sound more like metaphysical dualism to me just like the Cartesian arguments (if he quoted the Vedas, the Vedantas give the concept of only absolute monism, they are not dualists). He tries to mix the thoughts of two very different schools namely Idealists (only mind is real) and Materialists (mental and spiritual can be reduced to physical). Further, he uses the presence of “essence” as an argument supporting god, and apparently fell for the round-trip fallacy by implying that the “absence of proof” of its material origin is a “proof of absence” of its material origin. When one uses science as one’s support, there can never be a “dead end” argument. Who knows what might unfold tomorrow! After all, there have been times when people believed in full earnestness that the world was flat and the earth was the center of the universe. They killed people who said otherwise!!

We cannot deny that bodies acquire certain tendencies from heredity, but those tendencies only mean the physical configuration, through which a peculiar mind alone can act in a peculiar way. There are other tendencies peculiar to a soul caused by its past actions. And a soul with a certain tendency would by the laws of affinity take birth in a body which is the fittest instrument for the display of that tendency. – Evoking the “Law of Affinity” is plain cherry picking to justify his statement. Even if we assume Law of Affinity pervades all matter (which it does not and in the parts it does, it has various versions; in some instances likes attract, then some instances show that the opposites attract and some complex cases may present a combination of the two, a male and a female may be attracted to each other but they are physically the opposites), and having previously drawn a distinction between matter and spirit, how does he justify that the same scientific laws will apply to the spirit in the same manner as they apply to the matter? Diagonal application (between matter and spirit) is a far cry. Further, he subsequently claims that soul is a part of the almighty, an “abject”, deluded manifestation of God itself, this would mean that God itself is subject to the same laws, which would contradict the Omnipotence of god.

This is direct and demonstrative evidence. Verification is the perfect proof of a theory, and here is the challenge thrown to the world by the Rishis. We have discovered the secret by which the very depths of the ocean of memory can be stirred up-try it and you would get a complete reminiscence of your past life. – Well, the debate on reincarnation is another long and tedious thing to go through. The Hindu philosophy holds that a soul has to repay its debt through this continuous cycle of birth-death-rebirth. Being a pantheist, it also believes that a soul can be born as an animal depending on its behavior and conduct in the previous life. Plato was a vehement advocate of reincarnation. Christianity rejects reincarnation. Oriental philosophies believe Karma to be the sole evaluation criterion for reincarnation while some western belief systems hold that the subject has a choice in the matter. Whatever, we still haven’t reached a point in our intellectual journey so that we can even attempt to examine this alleged phenomenon. Assuming that reincarnation does happen, there have been several studies by psychologists in which their subjects somehow remember their past lives. OK. But it is a very peculiar observation that none of them has ever lived an animal’s life (but we saw earlier that souls can be reborn as animals), and the important people (parents, siblings, lovers etc.) in his/her previous life also occupy important positions in their present life, though the roles are swapped.

Déjà vu is another argument. Many people experience déjà vu, including me. But unfortunately my déjà vu is limited to the events about to happen in the near future. I dream about some insignificant event and a few days later the same thing unfolds in exactly the same manner. You might call me a deluded raconteur, but how can you reject my account? There is no way you can examine my brain and question its veracity or mendacity. Strange it is that I would be questioned but a person claiming to remember his/her previous life won’t. In light of all this, I would just say that the concept of karma is important, in the sense, that it maintains a moral thought among people. Humans always fear doing certain things because they don’t want to mess up their after-life. Probably, that was a reason why the concept of reincarnation was brought in the first place, to introduce a “selfish” motive behind a person’s moral behavior for the general welfare, because probably the Rishis had discerned that one’s own welfare is of the utmost importance to a person, if someone truly rises above it, he achieves Moksha, the ultimate emancipation from worldly worries and malaise.

All right, I am talking gibberish. Reincarnation does happen. But then, one must ask, what is the purpose of all this? Why create so many souls, put them on a “small mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam” in some dark, obscured corner of the universe? What does the Almighty Creator intend to do with our souls once they reach Heaven? Some say that “From each incarnation the soul takes the quintessence of its experiences. From these different episodes in the evolution of the soul, it is possible to gain a comprehensive understanding of many different experiences.” But what will the soul do after it has amassed so much experience? (Further it begets a paradox. If rebirths are truly meant to teach the deluded souls the ultimate truth by employing the faculty of experience, why do we witness infant mortality? Certainly it is safe to assume that a child who died at an age of, say, 5 years wouldn’t have gained any considerable spiritual experience. Then why first send it to earth and suddenly call the whole thing off? So, does the divine err a lot?).

The Hindu philosophy tells us that the ultimate goal of the soul is realizing that it is a part of something big, something grand and after this realization it finally merges with the omnipresent essence, the pervasive ether. But what after that? If this and only this is the ultimate goal then I find it to be a sheer wastage, which, given the attributes of god would be absurd. If you are still thinking that Hinduism actually tells us about a God, a being with no form, no anthropomorphic attributes and no judgments about our eensy, worldly behavior and conduct (I have faced this argument too) but who is present everywhere and just wants you to learn about the spiritual elation through Karma (that is more or less, Swami Vivekananda’s speech’s rest part), then I would say that you are playing with words now. Because, what you call as God I call a set of philosophical thoughts and as an atheist, I refuse to call it God. As a human, when I look up at the night sky, shimmering with umpteen stars, I wonder sometimes about the vastness of the cosmos and I am simply humbled. But that is, just a feeling, you might call it God, but I won’t, I call it the universe.

I would tell about Existential Nihilism, but as a human, you probably won’t buy it. We have a tendency of finding an explanation, a purpose behind everything which scientists and psychologists call an evolutionary necessity. But it isn’t always helpful, certainly not in these times when we have a Quantum physics which in a way implies that “God” does play dice. I could try to quench your thirst for a theistic explanation by proffering the possibility that, we are just an experiment at best, the denizens of a cosmic flask under precise observations by some cosmic scientist (which you would call god). Which leads to another premise that such a squeamish scientist would not want to interfere in its experiment’s vicissitudes. At best he/she would leave us alone and let us live our life on our own terms. Worrying about the recycling of souls would be far below on his/her list of priorities and so should it be on ours. Live life to the best possible extent and create a more tangible goal for your life. That is the best one could with one’s life according to me. (This is my explanation. I could call it God, but strange isn’t it? You wouldn’t accept it as God. You would call it a deluded, materialistic worldview!! Think again).