When Does Life Begin? The Paradox

Water Children from Kira Dane's film "Mizuko"

Years ago, when I was a Roman Catholic, I listened to sermon in which a priest attacked pro-choice Catholic politicians. He said of one, "I want to ask him when he thinks life begins." My response was that, well, I'm no biologist, but scientists have found traces of life that are 4.2 billion years old, so life apparently began over four billion years ago. All life since then has been that same ancient life mutating through an uninterrupted chain of transmission. That is to say that between one individual "life" and another there was no gap of dead matter. All life is a single river of living tissues. Every separate "life" begins with the form and matter of life before it.

         Of course, this isn't what the priest meant. He didn't mean living matter as defined by biologists--anything with the capacity to metabolize, self-repair, and replicate. He assumed, presumably, the theological idea that a newborn has an entirely separate existence, a soul, created out of nothing (non-life) at conception. At some miraculous moment, triggered by insemination, possibly adultery or rape, a human soul flashes into being even before it manifests any traits of humanity. It is from then on a separate thing, sealed off from the rest of the universe.

          It comforting to imagine that the conscious identity behind these fingers typing on my iPad exists in eternity, in some real sense perpetually me, This would, of course, involve eternizing some of my less admirable traits, but just because they're faults doesn't mean I don't love them. It's comforting to believe that all this me-stuff will always exist world without end, but this violates common sense. What is this me-stuff? Wouldn't my ten-year-old self be horrified to find himself trapped in my current identity, unrecognizable to him. And besides, my I-sense fuzzes at the edges.

Suppose we ignore antediluvian ameboids and focus on my personal coming-into-being in the early 1940's. My father's sperm entered my mother's uterus and began swimming toward an egg fated to become me--a fate known to God if God is omniscient. Did my eternal soul pop into being with this swimming, or did the Lord hedge his bets and wait until a winning sperm crossed the finish line and bumped the egg wall? Or even then, did He hesitate until the chosen one had penetrated the egg? Or until the chromosomes had fully matched up? Or until cell division began? Or until the blastocyst attached to the uterine wall a week later. When is my soul supposed to have popped into being? Maybe it didn't happen until the quickening, typically at four months, as suggested by Jewish and Islamic and English Common Law? Or did the infusion of a so-called "rational soul," supposed to be uniquely human, wait until I showed glimmers of actual rationality? That would set a very high bar and justify outright infanticide.

We are morally obliged to nurture newborn children, but there is nothing rational about them. My two-year-old terrier, Rumi, in addition to his complex range of emotional expressions, is about as rational as a human two-year-old. He's constantly testing me, reconfiguring my rules to his advantage, and it's not easy to outsmart him. If I try to manipulate Rumi, he manipulates back. He can't talk but has a toddler's listening vocabulary. Of course, the dog has hit a developmental wall. He's a lifelong child, and a human child will mature far beyond him. But a baby's claim to have a more rational soul than my dog rests in the future, not the present. 

When I think of my personal identity, the "me" I work to preserve and fear to lose, I think of the continuity of memory. I am everything I remember doing, seeing, hearing, and being, the breadcrumbs of the past. From my perspective, total amnesia would be the same as death and oblivion even if my meat parts kept walking around and seeing things. A life that I have absolutely no sense of is not mine. And yet this distinction also blurs around the edges. All memories are imperfect--edited, condensed, and distorted--and memories didn't kick in until after the age of three. Anything could have happened to me--a horrific trauma or unspeakable joy--in those blackout years when I was as dumb as my terrier. Whatever happened might have shaped the deep structure of my personality but would be no more part in my conscious identity. Immortality in the condition of myself at age two would also be the functional equivalent of death and oblivion. The "I" that I know would not exist.

Conscious personhood--the I-sense, ego, or soul--rises out of the void after the age of three and (as far as we can know outside of theology or parapsychology) sinks back at death. The biological basis for conscious personhood is a passing phase in a river of life that has been flowing for billions of years and will flow for as long as conditions allow. Eventually, in many stages, we separate from our parents and leave them behind us to die as we move on to become parents and ourselves die in turn, all without any clear moment when separation happens. It would be after birth anyway. At birth, we were perfectly derivative. Not only every gene, but every atom in us was once part of our parents' bodies. Mother and child are one flesh. The process of separation from the parents, Freud's obsession, is gradual, often painful, and never complete. Our parents were part of an organic stream flowing through their parents and grandparents and so on. Taking names, we pose as identities, as ivory chessmen, but are really more like waves on a lake.

When did my life begin? My semi-separate I-sense? Or its foundations? My only short answer is, "It's complicated." 

These reflections were prompted by "The Middle Way of Abortion," an article by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong in Lion's Roar (September 2021). Armstrong shares the story of Kira Dane, who had an abortion in 2017, when she had just graduated from NYU film school. At the time, the decision didn't seem problematic, but a few months later, she found herself sobbing with grief. "I had pushed away a lot of emotions. I had pushed away the the acknowledgment that abortion wasn't just a surgical procedure" (p. 39). A Buddhist ritual helped her come to terms.

In the West, we are too often trapped in either-or and yes-no thinking that blinds us to nuanced realities. We ask, "Is a fetus is a separate person or a lump of uterine tissue?" We want an either-or answer, and, once we pick one, we are trapped in one of two opposing camps. As Dane's experience suggests, the truth is more complex. The one-word answer is yes. Yes, the fetus is one or the other, and thus it is both. In its present state (and its future state too in the event of a miscarriage) the fetus is a lump like an appendix. It dies if removed from its host. Its present life is less human than a rat or any other post-birth mammal. But in the future, if its development takes a normal course, the fetus will become a human person. It is not a baby any more than it is a teenager, adult, or retiree. Baby is a false, sentimentalizing term; the fetus is an earlier stage of life that will become, with luck, every other stage of human development. Only blind sentimentality confuses the real with the potential, but only a colder kind of blindness does not grieve the death of human potential, the loss a possible human life. A future has been lost.

Either-or traps a woman in the false position of regarding her abortion either as a routine operation or as homicide. Armstrong suggests a middle way that respects the sacred potential of the unborn within the flow of life without forcing alternatives. Emblematic of this is a Japanese ceremony called mizuko kuyo, "water baby memorial," which honors lost fetuses from any cause. "It draws on the idea," she writes, "that life has no beginning or end. Life is a fluid resource which takes human form and then returns to the source with ease" (p. 39). The mizuko ceremony concretizes the "water children" as hand-formed clay statues and then dresses them in hand-made garments and brings them gifts. It respects them for their brief appearance in the flow of life.

Dane, whose 2019 film "Mizuko" explores the ritual, calls for a more balanced approach to abortion. "Real change comes from being honest," she says. "There are a lot of women who have had an abortion and want to be able to mourn, and at the same time know that they did the right thing. But it's really hard now because of that extreme debate" (Armstrong, p. 42).

The either-or mindset forces us to regard an action as either right or wrong. Everything is from God or the Devil, sweet or bitter, but this is a crazed Aristotelian dream, not the world we live in. Most of life is bittersweet and the Devil is always in the details. Nearly everything is both-and. All good deeds contain the seeds of regret. Every creation destroys. Every movement is a road not taken. Buddhism, like orthodox Christianity, disapproves of abortion. It violates the no-killing rule, which Buddhists apply even to insects. At the same time, however, Buddhists tend to be not trapped in the either-or categories, but recognize that things flow into each other. The destruction of a potential human life cannot in itself be good, but it is not a sole evil, not a circumstance existing in categorial isolation. As the Dalai Lama himself said in 1993, "I think abortion should be approved or disapproved according to each circumstance" (Armstrong, p. 40).

Anne Carolyn Klein recalls the instance of participants at an Indian retreat walking single file to avoid crushing insects, noting that they did not cancel the whole retreat, merely minimized harm in the situation while recognizing it and carrying on. "It's really important," she says, "to do your best and not say, 'Oh, well, you had to kill some bugs, so it must be okay.' We do things that are not okay, and we recognize that they are not okay. But we do them" (Armstrong, p. 40). This applies doubly with respect to human life. The world presents us with real-life Trolly Problems, dilemmas causing grief and regret no matter what we decide. An American who organizes mizuko ceremonies observes: "Nobody wants to have an abortion. That's something many people don't understand in this country. Nobody does this happily" (Armstrong, p. 42).