today's weather: B A S E L I N Eanxiety : 0 | agitation : o
today's unwanted guest: the Benadryl haze
Since last week when somebody confided in me about how she wanted to have an abortion, the subject has been on my mind. I came to recalling all we were taught about it (rather, against it) in those years I went to a strictly Catholic private high school. To this day, I am personally against abortion - I have never had one, and will never have one - but I don't go around picketing or trolling pro-choicers. But I'm not exactly pro-life either. You'll get what I mean in a while.
So. Catholic high school. Since our freshman year, we were taught sex education on a foundation of morality and ethics. It was so ethical that our teachers refused to entertain questions that used slang terms - so we never did hear what Mrs. Dizon thought about finger f***ing. In tandem with our "religious sex ed", we were made to watch a very graphic documentary on the evils of abortion. Very graphic. Indelible. As an extra-curricular activity, our advisers dragged us to an anti-abortion rally outside our school, bearing the heat and smoke just to be ignored by most of those who drove by. Our little rally made it to the front page of a minor newspaper by the way; to our dismay our school's name was grossly misspelled.
Aside from "a fetus is a human being", and "no one but God has the right to take away life," I often heard the argument "it is unfair / unjust to an innocent unborn baby," and "everyone deserves to live". There is even the good old argumentum ad misericordiam, "What if your mother decided not to keep you?".
But even as a teenager, I managed to find something fallacious with the whole anti-abortion argument. I did not disagree that a fetus is human, or that abortion is murder. But I just had some controversial ideas that I knew my teachers and classmates would stone me for, so I mostly kept my musings to myself.
One of those ideas was a defense against the "unfair / unjust" argument. I strongly believed that it was more unfair and unjust to keep a child alive without being able to provide a good life for him. For example, I believe a self-absorbed teenage crackwhore would do wiser by terminating the life of her baby than to let it live retarded, unwanted, fatherless, hungry, underpriviledged and so on. In extreme instances like those, I believed that killing a fetus would be an act of mercy toward it; it would be better to just send it straight to Heaven.
I'm one of those positivists who believe unborn children go to Heaven, by the way. There's no definite scripture on it, but I just keep thiking about the nature of God. In second grade in Catholic school , were taught that unborn babies go to a state called Limbo, which was somewhere around the neighborhood of Purgatory. It was our Language teacher who taught us that (that's how it is in Catholic schools: every subject is a religion subject, every teacher is a religion teacher) - the same teacher who attempted to scare us into being good girls by telling a detailed story of how naughty kids get dragged to Hell by their feet. Years later when I was a high school sophomore, I had a problem with the whole concept of Limbo and Purgatory when we learned in Chursh History that those places were just assumed and capitalized on with the sale of indulgences. When I was indoctrinated in Evangelical Christianity, I got this notion that the unborn went to Hell because "only people who receive Jesus as Lord and savior will be saved". Of course that whole idea is inconsistent with a loving God. But that's just my opinion. I stick with the belief that babies who die go to Heaven.
Anyway.
"What if your mother decided not to keep you?", we have been asked rhetorically in those anti-abortion seminars as an atempt to create an emotional impact. While most of the other girls shuddered and/or gushed at being so blessed to be alive, the touchy-feely tactics were lost on me, a fifteen year-old misfit with a death wish. Disturbed weirdo that I was, I did not consider my own life to be a blessing and preferred to have never been born. You know how unnecessarily emotive teenagers can get. I imagined it would have been better to have been snuffed out and first opened my eyes in the presence of God.
I often thought, What's the big deal about life on earth? It's squalid. Nature is deteriorating. Society is detiorirating. What's so "blessed" about being alive? I tended to think that some mothers who killed their unwanted spawn in utero were doing both themselves and their would-have-been-offspring a favor.
I remember trying to share those sentiments with friends but it just went flying past their heads. Morbid, my friends called me, not knowing that I thought of it as a very delicious compliment.
Death was a secret obsession - it wasn't mainly about suicide, but more like wishing I was never born. I was not the kind of person who obstentatiously and pretentiously dressed goth (except for fun), drank blood or slept in a coffin. I was always too cool for poseurism. My thing though, was curling up in a fetal position whenever I was alone. I heard some psychobabble interpretation that it was my body's way of trying to remember the last time I felt safe. But really, I just thought it was a compact, space-saving but comfortable way of stowing myself away.
I don't remember the last time I went on one of my fetal-pose retreats; it must have been that long ago since I got over it.
Through the years I've discovered that the best antidote against a death wish is a reason for living - a destiny, a purpose. A real solid one that only God can reveal. I don't think I'm halfway to halfway to realizing my purpose in life, but I've at least got a loose framework that invigorates me every now and then. Apparently I managed to stay alive and productive.
The first step to finding your purpose in life and realizing your destiny is to contact your Manufacturer. He can take calls about your questions and complaints too, if you have any. You might have some difficulty adjusting the settings (and there is no "restore factory settings" option by the way), but you'll get the hang of it.
