Q: When is a Baby not a Baby?

A: When you don’t want it.

A lot of things enrage me about the abortion debate, which is why that alone of all social/cultural/ethical issues I have difficulty talking about without getting upset. Over the years I have heard many (self-identified) abortion advocates (or their spouses or friends) use the phrase “going to have a baby!” when they (or their spouses or friends) are pregnant. They use words like “life” and “baby” even in the first trimester, inexplicably not seeing the double standard. I think this is because they want that baby. They want her to grow and develop and be born and live a complicated, dramatic life. The National Organization for Women even uses the phrase “Every Child a Wanted Child” to describe its stance on birth control. But the second that life is not wanted, well then it’s not a baby anymore.

“Hey, Dan,” you might be thinking “what’s with all this right-wing ranting? I thought you were a socialist?” Well friend, in the last few months there have been two similar stories in the news — with drastically different outcomes — that have caught my attention. I direct you to this story about an American woman who was implanted with the wrong embryo. Long story short: she had the baby, not for herself, but for the baby’s biological parents. Essentially she went from “mom” to “surrogate” in the space of a few seconds. But she knew that someone else wanted that baby. Now I wouldn’t exactly call this woman a hero — she pulled some stuff along the way that I have real ethical problems with — but she made an impossibly hard choice to a horrifying dilemma. Contrast that with this other lady in the UK who made the opposite decision. She didn’t want someone else’s baby growing inside her so she aborted. When I first read this I was stunned. I can imagine few acts more selfish. And it’s not just western culture that destroys things it doesn’t want. In India there is an ongoing genocide of girls through gender selective abortions. But really, why should we be horrified by that? The “slippery-slope argument” that conservatives are so fond of doesn’t even apply here. There is no slippery slope: it’s already happened. All those baby girls growing “in their mother’s stomachs” aren’t wanted. So who are we to judge? “Hey, China! It’s totally cool. We get it: you don’t want any girls either!”

I’ll let you decide  whether something the size of this period (.) is human. My point is more about the callousness of postnatal humanity. We live in an age where only the things we want are valued. And if we don’t want it, we destroy it. We live in a new Age of Imperialism where each of us is an empire of one. Like our forefathers who destroyed as many civilizations as they could get their hands on — whether it’s a forest or a whale or an embryo or a pre-modern hunter/gatherer society it must conform to our sovereign will. Once again we’ve proven our quality as a global community.