Jelly Babies

So, when does a human being first become that? When does mere organic matter coalesce into something sacrosanct, something to which inalienable rights and protections apply? For want of a better and less misquotable term  (not that anyone is ever going to quote from this obscure little piece) when do all those amino acids join hands and weld indelibly to the transcendent  - when does a human acquire a soul?

This is at the point of conception, is it not? Surely not. If we say that it is the presence of intact human DNA, fresh minted as it may be, makes an entity a person with rights, then this goes for a hair on my head as much as for me. Should our statute books ever support such reasoning, it would be very bad news for hairdressers. And what happens if I wake in the morning to find a hair or two staying behind on the pillow? Now they are not just hairs, but miscarried clone children. If I want to pluck out my nostril hairs, then I am aborting their still-gestating siblings. It’s pointless to say that hairs do not have the potential to become people as zygotes do: this is merely a technical difficulty. Find the right Petri dish or test tube and they have chance the same chance as any recently fertilised egg in utero.  Who are we to deny my twins, triplets, quadruplets and all who follow ad absurdum their chance at life?

But, if the soul does not arise at conception, then when? Birth seems a little too late: babies come out with brains and sense to relay experiences to them, and although it is at this point that our lungs breath air for the first time, our minds had, it seems, been breathing experience for some time already, suffused with its immutable vapours. Perhaps it is when the brain has developed to a certain point, although when exactly the Rubicon flows into the amniotic fluid is unclear.

This is precisely the problem. The human psyche has to ask the question when and find an exact answer. We simply have to have a divide – and that need to have one, perhaps where none necessarily exists, is what has created the abortion debate in the first place.

For my own money, I don’t see a problem with calling an early-term foetus a blob of jelly, mainly because that’s what it is. If we are to let jelly blobs into the fold of humanity, we have made fools of ourselves, and drastically undervalued the developed central nervous system that bestows the power of sentience upon us. That is us. Of course, our blob-swelled ranks would not be so much of a travesty were it not for the fact that they come to us inside another person, and that the rights of these blob-bearers (pregnant women as we call them) are compromised and even usurped by those of the unfeeling, unthinking, insensible blobs within. It makes women the thrones of blobs, non-sentient entities ruling from sentient seating, ruling our hearts and our minds. Well, not mine. Once the blob develops into something sentient, that is of course entirely different, but it is madness to subjugate our own needs to that of inanimate matter.