"You are entitled to be as pro-life as you like, but I will always put the life of a woman before the life of a foetus...Call me a baby murderer all you like, but I would rather be called that than be a part of something which denies protection to grown women."

Such is the dictum written by Alice Taylor in a recent edition of The Malta Independent on Sunday where in one swift stroke she relegates human life to individual phases where one phase is given more worth than the other is. This obsession with compartmentalizing the life of individual human being seems to fit in with our obsession of relativizing and subjectivising everything in our categorisations of life.

This seems to fit in with a tendency to be aggressive about how one feels in enforcing the rules and rights of life to one sector of our existence, the grown life, but not to another such as a senior adult's life, a child's life or the life of the unborn child call it a foetus (after eight weeks), call it an embryo or call it a zygote! The agenda of radical feminism espoused by Alice Taylor seems to fit in perfectly here! I of course write this as one completely surrounded by females at home but do not feel in the least emasculated by their proportionate responses to life events! The reality of course is that the human being is one from the beginning of its existence to the end of it. It is one life, one existence, one human being.

The philosopher Plotinus seems to have much to say about the "One". That it is essentially one and the same, that it is indivisible, that fractions of it are still fractions of the same one. Extrapolated to life issues, that means we have only one life and that it cannot be broken into fragments of a life but is itself whole and unique!

The concept of human dignity is such that human beings, as the only beings who can reason reflectively and who have obtained special standing in our world, we have thought to impart to all members of the species a special understanding of respect, a dignity that is consonant with every being's existence as belonging to this species, a respect that covers existential, environmental, social and economic rights. This being's life however cannot be divided into fragments of which one fragment is more important than the other. One cannot say that my adult life at 60 is more important than when I was 20, or my adolescent life of 15 years, or my child life of eight years, or my infant's life of eight months, or my neonate life of two weeks, of my foetal life of 20 weeks, or my embryonic life of six weeks development or my zygotic life, nor of my life when I am 80 or 90, if I manage to get there that is! These are just descriptive categories not existential categorizations! It is in effect one life with an ontological development which is constant, uninterrupted, indivisible, covering a particular time-space frame, with an intrinsic self-moving potency that is only interrupted by death! Is any part of my life during this trajectory more important than any other time especially so if interrupting this trajectory would result in a fatal outcome for the rest of the trajectory? The answer has to be a resounding no.

It is this aggressive feminist misplaced agenda, which is not based on any tabernacle of empirical evidence that sets out to overturn legal precedents. These strive to apportion more importance to one section of our lives now, against the sections of another person's life in another time-frame of development when in reality all life is dignified and should be respected whatever the time-frame of development or existence. The argument of my life now at 40 years of age being more important than your life at 20 weeks of development or even at birth or old age, as some are wont to argue, is a relativist argument enshrined in the cathedrals of subjectivity! Analogously it would mean that one's life at 40 years of age is more important that one's life at 20 weeks of intrauterine development or one's life at 60 years of age. It is not the time, nor the quality nor the space that provides the fundamental dignity, it is the life itself.

Is my life worth more than other's lives? In the annals of subjective argumentation, the answer seems to be in the affirmative but this would never stand the rigour of an objective truth related outlook. Even Aristotle could observe, that reason about our nature, natural law, tells us that man being a social animal requires us to respect or do to others as we expect others to respect and do to us. Our behaviour is limited by the rights and dignity of others and our own rights are limited by the rights of others. Medical embryology establishes the beginning of individual human life at fertilisation and our full respect has to be provided to human life from that point, as it has to be provided to fellow human beings who are 95 years old, as it has to be provided to human beings who have learning disabilities, cognitive disorders, mental disorders, physical disorders and whatnot. Consider that we all have up to at least five genetic deletions at birth and that others tend to follow in a spontaneous or induced fashion!

Does a mature women have a better right to a quality of life than that of the existential right of a growing baby, foetus or embryo inside her? Prima facie, is there a more important right to the quality of a women's life over the right to life of a developing foetus/embryo? The answer to this question has to be a resounding incomparable "NO'. The quality of a person's life can never be more important than the life of another human being itself! The quality of a women's life has to be Prima facie secondary to the right to life of any other human being by virtue of its being human and the dignity it carries and imposes.

It is also true that society tends to ascribe rights to adult humans that are not ascribed to young humans bringing in the much-maligned distinction between a human being and a human person, a person being in full possession of rights. But this distinction is brought in because an individual is recognised as not possessing capacities that are commensurate with a right, without of course extinguishing the time frame when eventually the individual grows to possess the faculties to exercise those rights. We exclude rights temporarily until the individual is mature enough to be able to exercise those rights. However, this concept of personhood cannot really be extended to the existential rights of an individual human being because all the faculties for development and growth are there already, because the fundamental ingredients of being human are present from the embryonic stage, because snuffing out a very young life automatically excludes him or her from exercising their full potential later on by the termination of that very life. If we then terminate this life voluntarily, we cannot argue that it was not able to exercise its full potential at law! In effect, human dignity is already infused in an individual human being at the stage of one, four or 32 cells as it is in a human being with a trillion cells. It is just a bunch of cells whether it is eight cells or a trillion cells, the genetics are there, the epigenetics are there, it is the same intrinsic potency for development, it is the same human life, it is the same one! A one which arguably does not exhibit all features of its existence at once as in fact it does not ever do so for the rest of its life! We are as incapable of thinking at six weeks of development as we are when under anaesthesia or when asleep or in a coma! Nonetheless, these things do not make us less human or less deserving of human dignity!

I have one word of advice to Alice Taylor. Cap your offensive rhetoric! Your aggressive feminist position is built on shaky subjective grounds and completely emotional in outlook. The tabernacles of empirical and legal evidence lie against your flawed arguments!

 

Dr Asciak is Senior Lecturer II at the Institute of Applied Science at MCAST