Like many, I have a few dark stains left on my sense of humor from all the dead-baby jokes I heard in junior high. I could fabricate a good one, given enough time to think of gruesome scenarios and obnoxious puns. How many dead babies does it take to tame a lion? Just one—it acts as a pacifier (does kitty want a binky?). Putting the quality of the joke aside, the dead baby is not a child, at all, but a comedic device. I would not use my baby cousin to test a swamp for alligators or, perhaps, prop-up a refrigerator while I searched for coins. The jokes cross racial and gender lines and take advantage of a simple irony: the idea of something precious ruined and abused. How many crystal vases does it take to knock your wife unconscious? One: smash the vase over the baby’s head and the shock will knock her cold.
I am flabbergasted by the force with which a dead baby can be thrown. Returning to Grand Rapids, I dared to partake in my stated political philosophy: listen first. I listened to a radio program on a professed-to-be Christian station, to prove to myself that I could be a moderate. I perceived the program to have a neoconservative agenda, not that I am an expert on domestic politics. I do know that the United States is trillions of dollars in debt and that its congress is struggling to agree on the proper tack for approaching a national budget. A Midwestern democrat made an unusual thrust at his opponents, stating that one of the major parties had decayed into a ‘cult’ that preserves tax breaks for the rich. That is my belief, as a closet liberal, but I prepared to be edified; I thought the neoconservative guru and alleged Christian figure was going to continue making his case about frivolous farm subsidies in that congressman’s state. Brazil would LOVE the U.S. to dump soy-subsidies and I might not be against a few Brazilian farmers getting paid, if someone persuaded me. Amazingly, the conservative radio host threw some dead babies at the issue. “We’re not the cult!—they’re the baby murderers!” Planned Parenthood, said he, was a critical drain on the nation’s treasuries. Is it just me or were we talking about farm subsidies a minute ago? Not only that, what about the defense budget? Can we not find some other line-items?
Stop me if you have heard this one before~ Q: How many sermons can a man with social difficulties and no theological training preach? A: It depends on how many are dead-baby sermons. I was briefly involved with a young adult group led by a well-intentioned young man. As the ministry floundered, he could not resist throwing a dead-baby at the congregation to stimulate their fervor. He said that every abortion was a blood-sacrifice laid on Satan’s altar. That bought him some time. It bought George W. Bush a few votes. If more people could hold a polar bear cub in their arms and appreciate how precious that life is, then Al Gore might have carried the day with an environmental policy platform. The cuteness factor is virtually the same but there are plenty of convenient, hominoid American babies to prop platforms with, stuff into snapping jaws or smash over our heads when all else fails. Dead babies are just another smoke-bomb in the utility belt...
Before I proceed, I need to take a step back and answer the question floating to the top of your mind: does John Daniel Gore hate babies? Fuck babies, I say. When I visited my nine-month-old cousin, he groused at me just for being a stranger and wiggled impotently on the floor. At his age, my dog Buster was just as stubborn but he was well socialized and had a neat, mole-exterminating instinct that saved me time and labor. Even my cousin’s cat, at nine months, could make himself useful by nipping mice from the barn. Live babies are a drain on time and capital because they are actual children. Babies are a threat to social interaction with other adults and therefore contribute to dyadic withdrawal, which can bring about the demise of partnerships. Live babies grow into larger, more mobile children and eventually start puberty, continuing to drain resources and becoming harder to control. Given the amount of time and investment put into conception versus the actual demands of parenthood, an escape clause is logical. A dead baby may just be a lesson learned but a live baby means years of financial struggle and interpersonal distress for unfit parents. Far from a blood sacrifice, abortion is the preclusion of an investment.
Dehumanizing arguments are part of the enticing battery of double-think strategies used to overlook homicide. My favorite piece of ‘choice’ propaganda featured a cracked-chicken egg, an acorn and an illustration of an ovum and sperm connecting (with a tiny lightning bolt, for effect). The captions read, respectively, “this is not a chicken, this is not an oak tree, this is not a person.” It would be clever, if not for the total collapse of the analogy. The egg was unfertilized and the acorn had not germinated: they were sources of nourishment, not actual off-spring. In the class Mammalia, mothers are the nourishment—the analogy fails. Tiny lightning bolt or not, a pair of gametes is not off-spring; they are no better than a pair of random cells. A few years ago, I read an article about sexist language in the reproductive discourse. The author warned not to bestow “mere cellular entities” with personhood. Musingly, I started probing for the line between person and nonperson, trying to create criteria that fit my values. Knowing no ghosts, golems or otherwise magical beings, I concluded that all people are mere cellular entities but that each has an essence of their own attached that builds through experience but starts with their unique DNA. A uterus is not a person any more than an acorn is a tree but a sapling is a soft young tree, just like a fetus is a soft young person. Bark or birth come in time but the moment itself is arbitrary: life has already started. Debates spawn, endlessly, about the potential and viability of that life but no other criteria is so inclusive. I prefer that the first mitosis be the recognized beginning of life because it cannot be undone by any circumstance we know. Nevertheless, I can imagine extrapolating my conclusions about viability in reverse so that the point of personhood were later, closer to puberty, when abstract thought becomes possible. Perhaps the point of language acquisition, for arguments’ sake. A fetus has never started bawling in a restaurant, for example, but infants do. Infants are milk-fed, tender and probably quite juicy—a family could redeem their short investment in a savory, thanksgiving supper. Most of us cannot stomach the idea of eating older children, especially with all the preservatives they consume via cheap sweets and microwave dinners. I digress.
There is no pupating-point.
In reality, I believe children are developing people, like myself. We experience no metamorphosis as complete as in the insect world: everyone is a developing person until they die and when a person dies should not be ours to determine. I qualify as being ‘pro-life’; I oppose war, capital punishment and the poaching of dolphins. If I cannot squash a jumping spider without feeling sad, I doubt I could actually kill and eat children, even if I can joke about it remorselessly. My love for humanity overpowers any disdain for babies. Given enough love and opportunity, they each contain possibilities for our species. I cannot stand to think they would become medical waste but I fear they are reduced to political waste by the same pundits who would save their fetal bodies. Without a heavy commitment to education, their potential cannot be developed. Perhaps it is easier to rub babies on the budget problem before they get beyond the point of being human pets.
I have, in-the-can, an essay about another piece of ‘choice’ propaganda I saw, a poster which begged the question “if the fetus you save turns out to be gay, will you still defend his/her rights?” My answer was “yes!” but the pro-choice patrol rebuked me. The piece’s intent was to weaken my pro-life stance with the anti-gay stance I am expected to have as a religious person. I was called “anti-women’s rights”, though I would gladly protest for equal pay, and “anti-choice”, as if I were dictating what goes on their hamburger or something similarly arbitrary. All of these terms are nothing more than buzzwords; miscalibrated bifurcation strikes again, with silly results. It were as if freedoms were more important than love or honor. My decisions to be pro-life and pro-gay both came from compassion and a sense of justice. I do not believe my detractors are anti-life any more than I am necessarily anti-liberty. In my canned essay, I accuse my peers of never removing their “policy-goggles”. The trope of this piece is that my policy goggles are stretched tightly over my face right now:
Throw the babies out, the bath-water is radioactive. Without proper care, they are destined to become the welfare mutants that these same politicians will use as scapegoats. Unborn children have become a device to distract from unsustainable practices tainted by corporate interest and election thirst. Let the children die, instead. I believe that government’s most important function in the twenty-first century is to protect individuals and the environment from exploitation by other institutions. If sensitivity for the unborn is such an effective screen for those who are unwilling to do that, then the cost of pity is too great. Our pity only wants an end to personal discomfort and right-to-life-campaigns give many people something to feel righteous about without asking them to embrace the complexity and difficulty of these issues or a change in their beliefs and life-style; it turns religion into an opiate instead of a stimulant. In a grim world, I am probing the line between true compassion and mere pity. True compassion might require me to acknowledge that I will not save the world’s unwed mothers any time soon. Perhaps I need to go back to the pro-choice ranks, where there is a better chance that we can support the children we already have so that they mature to be less like the people who only ‘saved’ them long enough to get better ratings or more votes.
I think that is as much text as anyone can stand in a blog entry. Peace be with you all.
