What is Life?

How asking a better question might help America reconcile living with abortion.

Perhaps there is one thing our divided America might agree on; life is not defined by Roe vs Wade.

Life is the experience of living and dying. We know this because we share a common experience — we all have to make life-and-death decisions. We know these decisions are hard, sometimes heart-wrenching and always complicated. We know that even doctors, preachers, scientists, and judges struggle to discern what makes life viable and meaningful. We know they don’t know either.

What’s the right choice for a medically-unviable fetus? What is the difference between ending an early pregnancy and a miscarriage? Is there morality only in miscarrying? What is the right choice for a severely impaired Alzheimer’s patient? Is there life for those permanently and unconsciously living in the prison of a hospital bed? Does a 15-week old fetus experience life or is it merely breathing like an aged or irreperablly injured body strapped to a ventilator? Are these living beings when there is no awareness of their own existence?

Most Americans understand there is moral ambiguity in ending such a life, that there is no clear righteous path. That navigating such life challenges provides us with radically different guideposts. That people of faith find comfort and solace in their religious practices, others in less-defined spiritual reflections, and still others in the science of life or even support groups. Most of us probably process life-and-death decisions through all of these lenses. There is no book that answers all of our questions about life and death.

Yet every day, Americans of all stripes make life-and-death decisions. We make them with emotional pain, sometimes guilt, and always with a degree of uncertainty.

All Americans are pro-life; they respect its sanctity. No one is for abortion. But, most Americans agree we all have the inalienable right to control our individual lives. For women bearing potential life, that same indelible and inalienable right holds no less true and so it must continue to.

What is life? I don’t claim to know. What I do know is that continually asking the question is something humans beings must do in order to make better and moral choices. Searching ourselves and each other is the only shared guidepost that can help us transcend the uncertainties of life-and-death decisions. It is the only way for us to distinguish the difference between ending a life and taking one.

Perhaps one more thing most Americans can agree on is that judges, even Supreme Court Justices, are hardly or uniquely qualified to answer such a question.

No, life is not defined by Roe vs Wade, but life without it means pregnancy is a threat to every woman’s life and liberty and there is no ambiguity that she is a living and conscious being.