Life begins at perception

Science has produced another marvel. It has created an artificial womb that can be used to provide a more suitable environment for preemie babies who cannot stay in the mother’s natural womb. It’s just one more way we as a race have advanced to better protect life.

But that’s where the confusion starts. What is life and when is it worth saving? If it is not viable life, then why expend the money and resources to preserve non-viable life when those resources can be used upon viable life or more important issues.

For years now, the field of medical science has been able to perform life-saving procedures for children within the womb surrounded by amniotic fluid. When the child later is born, the baby has little to no scarring from the procedure. Amazing to some.

But is it life saving? The same child in that womb that went under the surgical knife for a “life-saving procedure” could have its life terminated by a surgeon’s knife if the mother had a change of heart about the viability of that child’s life. Is it life? Where and when is the standard for life? Is there a fixed point we can use as litmus, a mooring?

Our Founders called it “The Quickening” and declared the taking of child from the moment of “The Quickening” as murder. It was the soonest they could know with the technology of the day, when the mother knew she was with child. We know much sooner but we feel, also, that we know much better than our Founding Fathers.

The argument today is that the baby’s life is not viable until it is born, so much later than “The Quickening.” That’s the premise of the Pro-Choice argument to validate and reason the taking of the life or the “goo” that is in the womb. These arguments certainly call into question the Founder’s claim that we are “endowed with certain unalienable rights”. If life is only a matter of our perception then so are the rights as explained in the Founding Documents.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness endowed by our Creator is the premise of the Constitution. Thus the desire for such and the right to such is wired in us at our conception, or our beginning, an endowment from on High according to the Framers. But was it conception or is it perception?

So if life does not begin in the womb neither do our rights. So when do our rights begin? Is it when our life is proven viable? Who is the final authority on viability? Who now validates my achievement of rights?

Whole civilizations have risen and fallen based on the philosophy that some life is viable and others are not. Whose perception of life can be so trusted as to validate and invalidate the existence of life? Is it the medical field or government?

Both our political parties have conceded to perception rather than conception. Democrats have declared that only once a child is born is it living, except when a Doctor is performing a life saving procedure in the womb, a child has been killed in the womb because of an accident, or now that we have artificial wombs to save the life of preemie babies. Republicans can’t decide what they believe until it’s a few months out from election and the whole GOP suddenly gets Religion. They have personal beliefs but there are the laws of land.

So law cancels life? Or is it life? If it’s not, then why are we saving it? If life is just your perception based on what you believe, and Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness were never endowed in the first place, then this great Republic is based upon a fraudulent idea. With all of our advances, the question still is simple but the more stark in its clarity: Is it a “life saving” procedure or “goo saving” procedure?

Andy Torbett of Atkinson writes a regular column entitled The Maine Conservative Voice. He can reached at meconservativevoice@gmail.com.