We are incomplete.

We know when we end but we do not know when we begin…this makes us incomplete. 

To make matters worse, the weight of political and religious ideological agendas from left and right and in-between have created a massive culture of fear that drives us away from the subject like monsters from torches being waved in anger by small-minded villagers who do not understand the nature of the thing that scares them.

Frankenstein is a good metaphor for the discussion of when life begins and what constitutes life.

The story written by 18 year old Mary Shelley in the early 19th century touches the heart of the question – what does it mean to be alive? If life can be defined by some as monstrous then it is much easier to justify its destruction. This is one of the many points in that excellent and complex novel.

When is a human a human?

It seems to me a human is a human the moment he or she is has a full set of DNA…so I guess I believe that the moment an egg and sperm combine we have a human being, albeit one whose future is unfilfulled and fraught with danger in terms of surviving nine months in the womb given the number of things that can go wrong. 

Still is life outside the womb in less dangerous? I would suggest it is likely more dangerous in some ways.

I sometimes believe that when discussions (we will be polite and call them discussions) about human life occur that people are not really talking about when a human becomes a human so much as when a human gains worth and value.

There is a utilitarian perspective that essentially states that a human life increases in value with experience and contribution to society. Essentially you start at zero (less than zero until a certain arbitrary point in utero). The problem with that argument is that it has terrible implications from a eugenics perspective.

Humans are not houses…we do not appreciate in value simply because of age. Frankly from a utilitarian perspective there comes a point in a human life where we depreciate as we age and become a drain on the health care system and society around us. Why should we take care of and value our senile grandmothers and spend thousands of dollars a year maintaining them in expensive wombs for the elderly called nursing homes? Simply because we know them? Simply because they managed to exist for 80 or 90 years?

On the other hand there is the very real problem of life in-utero and the impact on women that frankly men cannot understand. We will never understand what it is like to be a 13 year old girl and finding out that you are pregnant, to use an extreme example. We will never understand the profound life changing implications that has. What a man can understand is the affect of being told that a life that you contributed to will be ended and you have absolutely no say or right to a say in it. This is the pendulum having swung to the other extreme.

Of course the question arises does the fact that a human life is using your body as a life support system give you the right to terminate it should you choose to? There are circumstances where one must decide which life is more valuable…in those circumstances who chooses? The mother? The father? Faceless society and politicians? The courts? What basis are those decisions made? The utilitarian variable value system? Do we not have any inherent, unchangeable value as human beings at all? If so than we are back to the original question that people fear – when?

The person that is most directly impacted by these questions is the unborn child, followed by the mother, followed by the father, etc.How do we decide who should die in rare circumstances when it is one life or the other but not both?

There is no satisfying answer and less so without an adequate definition of when life begins. 

Intolerance at either end of the spectrum is ultimately unhelpful. We seek to establish rigid definitions and rules for a circumstance that is fluid and intensely contextual and that simply does not work.

In the meantime life continues to be incomplete as long as we are afraid to delve into and define its beginning.