being pro-life: a difficult discipline

Last updated on: March 25, 2016 at 4:37 pm by Rebecca Bratten Weiss

being pro-life: a difficult discipline 2016-03-25T16:37:46-04:00 Rebecca Bratten Weiss

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Let’s make being pro-life more difficult for ourselves, I said earlier. And I’d like to say a bit more on that – to think about being pro-life as a kind of ongoing spiritual discipline.

In The One by Whom Scandal Comes Rene Girard writes: “To escape responsibility for violence we imagine it is enough to pledge never to be the first to do violence. But no one ever sees himself as casting the first stone. Even the most violent persons believe that they are always reacting to a violence committed in the first instance by someone else.”

This imagining is key. We imagine ourselves doing violence – we imagine it in our games, our sports, our movies. We imagine it in theoretical ethical setups which enable us to concoct reasons why we need to have guns, and state our willingness to kill an intruder in order to defend the innocent. In my case, I pretend to be a warrior queen when I go after weeds with a machete.

In order to imagine violence we have to draw a series of circles around things we believe to be have the right to life. And it suits us to draw these circles very small indeed. That way, we can imagine lots and lots of violence, outside their boundaries (in fact, beings outside the circles often justify violence by supposed threats to beings inside the circles).

Where do we draw the circle?

Some draw the circle only around certain humans. Some extend the circle tentatively to include cute animals (but not non-cute ones like snakes or spiders). Some extend it to include all animals unless you have a good reason to kill them (food or protection). Interestingly, most of these circles, while containing most humans, usually exclude at least a few (enemies in war, criminals, intruders, the unborn, the unfit, etc). Even those who usually keep all humans (and cute animals) within the circle make exceptions to the right to life when it comes to radical cases: mass murderers, pedophiles, ISIS.

It’s understandable, because even if we aren’t consciously interested in killing we like to retain the option to kill in self-defense if things get really dire. But even then one has an option, if one invokes the principle of double effect, to focus on “stopping an aggressor” as an end – not on “killing an aggressor.”

My practice for the past year has been to approach every living being, even a fly, as though it has value. Life itself, the more we understand the intricacies of science and the natural world, remains something that should fill us with awe. While life’s energy is never truly lost in the universe – the decaying body feeds the soil which feeds the plants which feed us – it is impossible for us to restore the life of that one tiny creature.

“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.”

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

At present my rule, if I plan to kill, is: am I going to eat it? If not, why am I killing it? If it’s a poisonous spider endangering my kids, or a raccoon attacking my chickens, I will kill…IF it is the only means of protection. But I prefer not to.

Yes, animals kill one another all the time. But “animals do it” isn’t much of an ethical excuse for anything. And as human beings are not entirely immersed in pure environment, so we often act in ways not part of the natural food cycles. Josef Pieper’s distinction between “environment” and “world” is relevant here. Human persons transcend environment, and in this we find our profound religious sense, but here also we find our capacity for destruction. So when we act in a way that is not part of a functioning eco-system, we should consider whether in so doing we cause harm. Yes, environmental responsibility is a matter of morals.

On a basic level that means that if larvae are eating my cabbage, and I’m not going to eat the larvae myself, I should enlist the help of something that does want to eat them, before killing them outright (even by organic means).

This does mean putting up with some grossness, and with some inconvenience. The Christian life is gross and inconvenient, however – look at a Grünewald crucifix. But it is also filled with wonder, and when we give ourselves over to wonder we will think less about what we can kill, and more about how we can keep alive.

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