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The news has brought back the old question “What’s life?” We seem to have an almost universal agreement about the end-of-life. Modern medicine is able to keep the body alive long after there is no brain activity and that has become the definition of death – no brain activity. On the other end-of-life, the question is when does it begin? According to the Georgia legislature, it begins when the woman recognizes that she’s pregnant. I don’t ever recall seeing that definition before. Those of you who read this blog know that I lost my first wife and child in childbirth. My definition of life beginning is the same as the majority of the world – a successful birth. Anytime before that, you have the potential of life and nothing more. I’m going old history here of this blog, but where did this idea of life beginning before birth come from? In one of the college courses I taught, we traced the history of this idea back to what would seemingly be an unrelated belief. It is the Roman Catholic belief in purgatory. Purgatory is a state or place where people pay for their sins before going to heaven. This is very important as there is no way to heaven except through purgatory. Another important Roman Catholic belief is that you must be baptized to even get into purgatory. Even with this background, we haven’t answered the question about the beginning of life occurring before birth. I’m going to ask you to put yourself in the shoes of nuns working in a Catholic hospital. They would see miscarriages and even stillbirths. They knew they could baptize in case of emergencies and would do so in cases of stillbirths. An aside: my daughter who died along with my wife in childbirth was baptized because the event took place in a Catholic hospital. Back to the question at hand, the nuns then sought guidance whether they should baptize the results of miscarriages. The question further was at what stage of the pregnancy should the results of a miscarriage be baptized. The Catholic Church decided any miscarriage should be baptized. The rationale was it is too difficult to know when the soul enters a fetus, so the assumption has to be that it enters at the moment of conception to avoid this problem. This ruling had absolutely nothing to do with abortion. However, logic demands that if the soul enters at the moment of conception, it follows then that is a human being. This is what makes the abortion debate so difficult. The anti-abortion groups are relying upon a religious belief and any time you challenge someone’s religious belief they get angry. I have found my anti-abortion friends don’t like the idea that their belief against abortion is religious based. They tell me that it’s based on science. There’s a heartbeat and the fetus has hands and so on, so scientifically it’s a human being. The problem is the scientific definition would be it has the potential to become a human being. That angers them even more because I am challenging their religious belief.

With all this background, I am going to leave you with one more question that I always left my students with. Should there be antiabortion laws because it would mean we would have a law based on religious belief? My students immediately would say yes because it’s a good law. The trouble is people and just not my students don’t think about the consequences. Here’s a couple of examples. The Hindu religion is the major religion among many in India. The cow was sacred in the Hindu religion. A Hindu would be sickened by you eating a hamburger or a steak. They would likely want to pass a law banning the eating of beef. In fact, such a law is being debated right now in India as part of a run-up to their ongoing collection. It is the same sort of thing that occurs in our elections when one party runs against abortion. The second example would be the Muslim tradition. They pray five times a day. In a Muslim country at the time of prayers, everything ceases. Stores must close. If you are a business owner and a non-Muslim, would you like to be forced to close your store at prayer times? Our debate abortion comes down to should we make laws based on religious belief? What do you think?