A Great Waterfall of Souls
“Personhood” bills are pending in
six state legislatures, and since Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health has emboldened
“pro-life” forces more such bills will probably be introduced in red state legislatures. It is said that the Oklahoma bill has a good
chance of becoming law soon. A personhood
law defines a human zygote (fertilized ovum) as a person for all legal
purposes.
By the time a zygote gets into the uterus it will ordinarily have divided about 12 times and become a blastocyst, a sphere one to two tenths of a millimeter (about the thickness of a sheet of paper) in diameter. A blastocyst that is going to engender
a normal pregnancy must attach itself to the lining of the uterus in such a way
as to make it possible for a functioning placenta, which will hold the growing
embryo in place and give it access to the mother’s bloodstream, to develop. Such attachment is referred to as the “implantation”
of the blastocyst. If it fails to implant, it sails on through
the uterus and continues hopefully dividing until a hostile environment kills
it. About half of all blastocysts fail to
implant and are excreted in the urine.
That means that in the U.S. more than 10,000
zygotes/blastocysts miss their chance of implantation each day. Under a personhood law, every one is a person
with all the same rights as any living person.
According to “pro-life” rhetoric, American mothers are murdering their babies by callously flushing them down the toilet at the rate of
10,000 precious babies a day!
Even if it has no chance of surviving
to become a live baby (in the usual sense, i.e., something that looks and metabolizes
like a human born alive), the living zygote/blastocyst is still a person whose
life is as precious, and as protected by law, as that of any other. Is the mother guilty of child abuse if she
doesn’t hold her urine as long as possible, then urinate into a jar and
immediately call 911? Fishing the "baby" out and putting it into a normal saline solution at body temperature will surely
prolong its life, and who knows when progress in in vitro gestation might
make it possible for the pinhead-sized person to turn itself into a bouncing
bundle of joy?
The (predominant) religious portion
of pro-lifers should be considering the question: “What is the eternal fate of
the 10,000 blastocyst-persons dying every day?”
Some of the major denominations have a clear doctrine on the afterlives
of unbaptized infants but some do not.
The most strident pro-lifers are mostly from "independent" evangelical factions
that have never officially considered any such abstruse question. By and large they don’t accept infant baptism
anyway, but for other groups serious questions arise: Isn’t baptizing one of
these babies before it dies the greatest possible act of spiritual charity? If the baptizand is already by necessity
immersed in water, need the baptizer do anything more in the way of splashing
or immersing, and if so, how? For the
sacrament to be valid, must the baptizer be able to sense the presence of the
baptizand? Should a sexually active
woman, whenever she tinkles, pronounce conditional baptism over the toilet before
she flushes? (For traditional Roman Catholics, how many years’ indulgence does she earn each time she
does so?)
Of course similar questions
present themselves to anyone who claims “Life begins at the moment of
conception” (by which they mean the life of a human person begins at that
moment) whether or not they have the reinforcement of a personhood law. And of course no answers to any of these questions will be forthcoming
from that quarter.
