The “miracle” that occurs when a sperm and an egg unite, or why masturbation is more humane than abortion.
One of the hot topics around which heated debates continue is the question of banning or allowing abortions. We are talking about killing the fetus currently in the mother’s womb. The paradox of this problem is that in order to kill someone, it is necessary to at least first give birth to him, because death by its very meaning is the opposite of childbirth and the killing of unborn babies is logically a rather non-trivial task.
To put it simply,
How can you kill someone who has not yet been born?
A little information from Wikipedia: Abortion is completely prohibited by law in countries such as Nicaragua, El Salvador, Malta, Philippines, Vatican City, Afghanistan, Angola, Bangladesh, Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Ireland, Yemen, Colombia, Lebanon , Libya, Mauritania, Mali, Nepal UAE, Oman, Paraguay, Papua New Guinea and Syria. In these countries, any abortion is considered murder and is punished accordingly, even in cases where a woman needs an abortion for medical reasons and without it she faces death. In a number of countries (Algeria, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ghana, Kenya, Costa Rica, Morocco, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Poland, Uruguay), abortion is allowed in extreme cases. In England, Israel, India, Iceland, Luxembourg, Finland, Japan, it is permitted for medical and socio-economic reasons, as well as in cases of rape. Only a handful of countries give women the right to decide for themselves about their own pregnancy.
Let’s immediately determine how the church views abortion. Since the latter draws information for her judgments not from the actual manifestations of the surrounding reality, but only from several old books, then even the very fact that she has an opinion regarding abortion must inevitably be tied to a certain stanza of holy scripture. As the centuries-old practice of searching for grains of meaning in the wilds of Tolmu-evangelicals shows, abortion is not mentioned in them and, accordingly, any discussions on this topic by church leaders are exclusively speculative and pursue only opportunistic goals of a given denomination.
On the other hand, it is completely understandable why the church is, in principle, against abortion. Each child is a potential addition to the flock, the number of which is the only measure of the success of church activities. This is especially true in cases when another child is born into an already large family, the very fact of its appearance reducing the already slim chances of the rest of the offspring to receive an education and turn into something free-thinking. Lack of education, as a direct consequence of large families, in turn pushes people into the open bosom of religion. Thus, an abortion is minus one member of the flock and there is no need to rack your brains for a long time in search of any other reasons why the church does not like it when women do not give birth.
It is unlikely that anyone will seriously object to the fact that the attitude of opponents of abortion to the problem is determined mainly by the fact that, starting from a certain stage of its development, the fetus begins to take on easily recognizable forms. Let us pay attention to the fact that if he at that moment resembled a nasty old man or if he had three legs or four eyes, he would hardly have had any problems with abortions. However, the fetus on the echograph screen is treacherously cute and inevitably triggers a characteristic set of subjective emotions: how can you kill it, so similar to a little man, even if it has not yet been born?!
It is interesting that in order not to be accused of excessive sentimentality, the church bypasses this sensitive point, claiming that the offspring becomes equal before God immediately after conception, that is, that the existence in nature of a microscopic clot of mucus, significantly inferior in complexity of structure a worm curled up somewhere nearby is just as important as the life and health of an adult, his mother. It is difficult to oppose such an emotional approach to this problem with anything constructive, but we will still try.
Let's start with the obvious fact that the attitude towards what is in the womb of a pregnant woman as a full-fledged living person stems, for the most part, from the presence of such wonderful devices as medical echographs, with the help of which ultrasounds are performed. It is this device that gives us the opportunity to look inside the uterus and see an embryo in it, which, depending on the time that has passed since the beginning of pregnancy, may be more or less similar to what we associate with the image of a person. At the same time, starting from a certain moment, you can see his arms, legs, head, and so on. Our ancestors, who did not yet have such technology, were much less prone to sentimentality on the topic of someone else's pregnancy. They could not see what was happening inside and, accordingly, they did not start the emotional reflex arc, at the end of which modern opponents of pregnancy see murder.
An important word in this context is “alien,” because fighters for the life of embryos discuss the processes occurring inside the body of other people who are in no way connected with them, for some reason confident that this somehow concerns them. What makes these kind-hearted people come to the conclusion that they have the right to interfere with the physiological processes occurring in other people's bodies?
Figure 1. Stages of human embryo development.
If you try to at least temporarily put aside emotions and look at the fetal development cycle as a whole (see the figure above), then one difficult, but absolutely fundamental question arises:
From what point exactly should an embryo be considered not a part of the mother’s body, but something independent from her, having its own rights to a judicial decision regarding its future?
Do body parts have independent rights? Can the left hand sue the right? In the 21st century, most likely not. But something tells us that with an embryo the situation is more complicated. Let's be honest: it's all about the soul, isn't it? Unfortunately, without using this term you will not get far in this matter.
The similarity of the embryo to a person and the independent sporadic movements that it makes while in the body of the uterus, for adherents of the camp of soul-saviors, means only one thing: it has SHE!
If you are an opponent of abortion, then you must admit that when you mention this word, a certain picture appears in your imagination and most likely it is a fetus curled up comfortably in the womb, very cute, with its eyes closed, resignedly awaiting its fate. You also have to admit that most likely you have seen a similar picture somewhere on the Internet or on TV. I tell you this as a father who was with my wife through every stage of pregnancy and was also present during the birth. There is nothing cute about the way it all looks and is rather reminiscent of footage from the movie “Aliens.” The amount of pain a woman experiences during childbirth is such that in the end she doesn’t care what, how, or in what form “comes out of there,” as long as it happens as quickly as possible. At the same time, the pain experienced by the fetus itself is apparently no weaker.
I, like you, love my child very much, but I must note that what will come out of him in the end has very little to do with what exactly comes out of the mother’s womb and depends almost exclusively on how you take care of him. raise and educate.
But let’s return to the soul: we don’t know what it is and would not like to discuss this difficult issue in this article, but we are forced to use this term, assuming (though without any reason) that all people are at least approximately understand what we are talking about. People tend to spiritualize those to whom they are attached, and these may well be other animals. We know on some subconscious level that our dog has a soul, although we cannot explain it in words. It could be a hamster, fish, parrot, cat, guinea pig, gecko, and so on. Having lived next to us for a little while, these creatures automatically receive from us the status of possessing a soul, even regardless of the fact that sometimes they are insects. Note that all of the above is eaten with pleasure in China, which, apparently, is the reason that there are no problems with abortion there.
So, any discussion regarding the harm or benefit of abortion comes down to the question of whether the embryo has a soul or not, and if it has one, then at what point it appears. After all, if there is no soul, then the question is automatically removed, since we cut our nails and hair without a twinge of conscience, despite the fact that they, just like the fetus in the womb, are continuously growing, and sometimes even make independent movements (for example, stand on end) .
Note that there are no clear boundaries between periods of pregnancy. This process is smooth and takes about nine months for a person. The exception to the above scale is stage number 0. It is at this moment that the sperm merges with the egg, resulting in the formation of a zygote - the very first stage of development of a multicellular organism. This is precisely the act during which the unborn child is born. But how does a zygote differ from an egg, what is so special about it that transfers it from the level of one of the cells of the mother’s body to the status of a person, because the only difference between a zygote and an egg is that after fertilization, the chromosomes of the latter consist half of the mother’s chromosomes, and to the other half from the father's chromosomes.
Here we are forced to recall the existence of such a phenomenon as parthenogenesis, in which a baby is born from an unfertilized egg, that is, without male participation at all. Despite the absence of a male, parthenogenesis is a full-fledged sexual reproduction, since the embryo is formed from an egg, which is a reproductive cell. The flaw in this argument is that parthenogenesis, except in rare cases of virgin birth, does not occur in humans.
The inevitable objection in this case will sound something like this: “Naturally, lizards don’t have souls!” We had the opportunity to deal with lizards and some of them behaved so intelligently (especially when they had offspring) that the question involuntarily arose about whether they had at least a very small soul. At the same time, individual representatives of the human race definitely do not live up to these lizards, which suggests that they lack the latter or have lost it during some serious mental illness.
But let's get back to pregnant people. At what point do we call this slimy ball floating in a woman’s womb “Baby”? As we have already said, stage “0” is the only moment of pregnancy when it is possible to draw a clear line between “before” and “after”. Then there is a slow and smooth process of maturation without sudden sudden transformations, during which the essence of the embryo somehow fundamentally changes. At what exact moment does the unborn child have a “soul”, the destruction of which opponents of abortion accuse poor mothers of?
You can run your gaze endlessly along the above diagram, trying to notice visual signs of the appearance of a soul, but this is a rather pointless exercise, since no one can really explain what he is actually looking for. Finding a soul is a much more difficult task than finding a black cat in a dark room, since in the latter case we at least know what a cat is.
If we talk about abortion from a technical point of view, it is obvious that the complexity of this operation and the potential risk to the woman’s health depends mainly on the stage of pregnancy at which it is terminated, as well as the methods by which the abortion is performed. Abortions performed by trained doctors in hospital facilities are one of the safest medical practices. At the same time, artisanal abortions performed by women themselves or with the help of unqualified personnel without proper sterility conditions are hundreds of times more dangerous. But this is precisely the type of abortion that women are forced to resort to in countries where abortion is prohibited by law.
In no case will I undertake to give any moral assessment to a woman I don’t know who, as a result of certain circumstances, has come to the conclusion that she needs to have an abortion. However, I can say with complete confidence that those who claim that her pregnancy, whatever its cause, is part of the plans of the ancient Mesopotamian god and on this basis is some kind of sacred act, the interruption of which is immoral and sinful - these are evil idiots interested only in observing their religious cults, to which they are ready to sacrifice the destinies and lives of millions of innocent people.
There is another side to this problem. The fact is that, with rare exceptions, almost all abortion deaths occur in developing countries. These are precisely the countries in which abortion is prohibited for religious reasons. These are also those countries in which it is especially difficult for the younger generation to get an education and somehow get out into the world. And these are the countries in which unfortunate mothers are forced to give birth to children, condemning them to vegetating in poverty and/or the need to join criminal groups in order to somehow survive.
A low level of education, the dominance in the minds of people of formless myths addressed to a faceless celestial being, the search for answers to moral questions in books written by ancient ignoramuses - this is what the church is pushing humanity towards and the ban on abortion is just one of the manifestations of its pernicious influence on free will and thoughts. However, we will not delve into the religious aspect of the abortion problem here, because people who are guided in their thoughts and actions not by reason and knowledge, but by holy psalms, are unlikely to read this article.
Instead, we turn to people who are still able to listen to the voice of common sense and ask them a rather simple question: should a woman have the right to dispose of her own stomach, along with all its contents, or not? True, in light of the above circumstances, we will have to complicate this question somewhat by reformulating it as follows: does the fetus have a soul and, if so, should the mother be its hostage?
Let us remind you once again that we do not know what the soul is and, accordingly, we have little idea of what exactly needs to be looked for in the body of the embryo. By the way, you don’t know this either, even if this word evokes some vague associations in your mind.
In order to determine how much meaning is contained in the picture below, we need to turn to physiology.
Figure 2: Possible spiritualization of the egg
So what exactly happens during conception? The egg, the female reproductive cell, in general, contains all the information necessary for the development of the fetus and, as we saw in the case of parthenogenesis, it alone can give rise to completely full-fledged offspring. Why then is fertilization (conception) necessary if everything can, in principle, work without it? From what we know about sexual reproduction, it seems quite clear that it is necessary in order to give the offspring a chance to differ from their parents by containing the characteristics of both of them in a mixed form (genetic recombination). It is this circumstance, as well as the fact that the process of conception is potentially associated with a large number of mutations, that is of the greatest evolutionary significance.
Be that as it may, conception is actually nothing more than the fusion of the female and male sets of chromosomes (XX + XY) inside the egg after the penetration of the sperm into it, which triggers further processes of ontogenesis.
Figure 3: Sexual Reproduction
Let us once again recall the question that we are trying to answer here: at what moment does something with a soul emerge from soulless germ cells and how to determine its presence in the fetus.
Figure 3 shows an extremely simplified diagram of the fusion of germ cells. In fact, it is much more complex and consists of a large number of specialized stages. There are many resources, including a school biology textbook, with which you can delve into the details of this phenomenon as deeply as you wish. However, the higher we make the resolution of our instrument of cognition, the less chance we have for the details appearing before us to remind us of something as vague as the soul.
This is the conflict between science and religion. Science is not able to find confirmation of what the latter so categorically insists on. This, in principle, is not surprising, given the fact that all major religions were founded in a time when science simply did not exist and superstition reigned supreme. Let's imagine a situation where ancient people are trying to understand why an airplane flies. They will most likely be able to disassemble it into the smallest parts, but no matter how long they look at them, without an understanding of aerodynamics this will not help them much. It is not difficult to guess that the conclusion to which they will eventually come will involve some invisible, weightless, all-pervading substance capable of divinely lifting objects above the ground and carrying them through the air. The soul of the aircraft will be for them the same indisputable fact as the lift and thrust of the engine are for us.
Thus, our main problem is not to understand when and how a soul appears in an embryo, but to establish some tangible sign of its appearance, which we could somehow register. Otherwise, the soul will remain just one of the shapeless myths with a beard, stretching back to the times when people believed that the wind was caused by the swaying of trees.
Another problem is that the appearance of the soul we are looking for should supposedly occur as a result of the interaction of two soulless substances - the sperm and the egg. Knowledge of the simplest principles of mathematics suggests that zero plus zero cannot in any way equal one, and this obvious paradox erects an insurmountable logical barrier on our path to discovering the soul.
From this moment on, the question of how to behave further ceases to have anything to do with reason. No amount of knowledge or deductive ability will help us anymore, because 0 + 0 does not equal 1, no matter how much we strain our imaginations trying to imagine some outstanding exception to this rule. There are simply no exceptions here.
Let us remind you once again for those who decided that we have lost our way that the church claims that the soul appears precisely at the moment of conception, and therefore that 0 + 0 = 1.
The only way to counter this simple formula is to assume that the egg and sperm already have a soul. However, this monstrous statement will immediately turn all men without exception into mass murderers, because it will mean that in just one masturbation session each of them destroys hundreds of millions of innocent souls with tiny tails.
Thus, all that remains for us is to put our heavy armor of thought in a heap and, like naked cherubs, taking a candle in our hand, line up for an appointment with a regular church psychotherapist.
However, we are not putting an end to this, not at all. We just came to the conclusion, and quite obviously, that the mind is not at all the tool that needs to be used to search for the soul. However, what should be guided in solving this problem (as, indeed, all others), if not by reason?
Here the church staff will probably happily congratulate us - we ourselves figured out what they had been trying to convey to us for a long time:
You can’t understand the soul with your mind, you just need to believe in it!
However, do not rush to give up on us - we are not giving up yet. On the contrary, we are further from this than ever before.
Yes, the word “faith” evokes in many people some incomprehensible mental relaxation, as if to enter the Faculty of Mathematics it would be enough to simply firmly believe that all problems will be solved.
In a religious context, the word faith corresponds to a rather vague promise given to believers by a certain inhabitant of orbits beyond our minds, and which includes eternal life after death, provided, again, there is a stable belief in his incomprehensible existence. It’s quite confusing, but the role of the church is precisely to clarify this delicate moment.
However, in our pristinely materialistic view, it is completely incomprehensible why everything should be so complicated. The word "faith" is a completely normal word that is very useful in many life situations, especially if used in conjunction with the word "trust". I can believe that my cat is sitting in the next room and not worry too much about whether I’m mistaken or not, since I can go and check at any time. I can trust the president if he and his party have brainwashed me thoroughly enough, but again, all their statements can be verified if desired. At the same time, when the killer claims in court that he is not guilty, his statements must be confirmed or refuted by the investigation. In other words, whenever a question of faith arises in everyday life, the question automatically arises of how high the probability is of what you are going to believe in this case. Or, simply put, how much you can trust it.
The principle of trust seems quite logical and should, in theory, be universal, but for some obscure reason, it is completely inapplicable to religion. For anyone capable of logical thinking, the belief in something that cannot be verified in any way will raise great doubts, and the majority of believers are precisely such people. However, there is a reason why the very moment they turn their mind's eye to, say, the Old Testament, all their logic and common sense disappears without a trace.
We have always been surprised by this circumstance, and we have repeatedly looked into the holy scriptures ourselves to understand what is there that makes it worth stopping to think. We spent a lot of time trying to catch this secretive beast by the tail, but were a complete fiasco. It seems that the overwhelming majority of believers simply did not read the Bible or read it very selectively, guided in their reading by church speech therapists.
We even translated some of the texts into normal, human language. Excerpts can be read here: link to my translation of the Bible. Reading these texts in their, so to speak, naked, undressed form, you are amazed at the primitive cruelty and boundless naivety with which they are filled. What exactly can evoke high feelings in them, especially the desire to kneel and mutter incoherent recitatives, remains an unsolved logical problem for us.
It is quite obvious that logic will not help in resolving this issue, just like common sense. In other words, in order to search for the soul, you need to blindfold your eyes tightly, plug your ears deeply and completely turn off your brain. This is exactly the state of aggregation that must be accepted at the entrance to the temple of God, even if you enter there mentally. There, inside, when you try to think not with your head, but with a hollow fibromuscular organ (the heart), truly anything is possible, including the miracles described in the biblical bestsellers.
In such an amorphous form, the impressionable and chronically thirsty human consciousness is an excellent building material for the sculptors of faith waiting for them within. Modeling begins from childhood and towards adulthood, under (un)favorable circumstances, an enthusiastic and completely sincere fan of this version of the tale about the main boss emerges from the doors of the temple. It doesn’t matter which temple a person ends up in. The choice of the nearest doors is made for him by life circumstances. But no matter where he ends up, after a fairly short time he will be absolutely sure that he could never enter through other doors under any circumstances.
Subsequently, the overwhelming majority of graduates of these academies of absolute confidence in absolute correctness, sincerely believe that the picture of the world they received as a result is the only correct, the only worthwhile, the only reasonable and, in general, the only one. These lucky ones found their soul by simply removing questions about its type, shape, operating principle and origin. For them, now only one thing is not clear: how there are still people on earth who think differently from them and some of them devote their future lives trying to bring order to this, sometimes using explosives or cutting off heads.
So, we didn’t find the soul, and what’s worse, we couldn’t even figure out what exactly we needed to look for, and, therefore, we still didn’t understand what exactly the moral aspects of terminating a pregnancy were. We are not able to dissuade those who are sure that they see a soul in the zygote, since we are not able to understand what they see there, and they, in turn, are not able to clearly explain it to us.
But could it be that some opponents of abortion do not look at this problem from a religious point of view? Could they have other, reality-related reasons for this? After all, there are entire movements of opponents of abortion, such as the pro-life movement. Let's see what they start from and what they use to support their views.
Here is a photo on the Pro-Life Action League website where members of this league, gathered in a circle, sing Christmas songs, holding posters with inscriptions like “Protect Life!” But is each of these compassionate citizens ready to personally take care of any particular child whose birth they so insist on? Raise him, raise him as your own, pay for his education, look after his health? If the organization of which they are members is international, are they ready to shelter within their walls a couple of children, say, from the Congo or Somalia? No?
Let's pay attention to the strange fact that these people are not defending the rights of some person known to them, such as Nelson Mandela or the lead singers of Pussy Riot, and not a group of oppressed people in some part of the world, such as the rights of the Uyghurs in China, at all No. Instead, they are concerned with the fate of people who, to put it mildly, do not yet exist. At the same time, they have no idea who exactly, nor where, under any circumstances, is going to appear or not be born, nor how terrible the living conditions of someone who will be forced into this world may turn out to be. And this is in the context of the current crisis of overpopulation of the planet, in the conditions of a deepening environmental catastrophe!
And yet, what arguments can they have to defend their position? Let's look at another site's page dedicated to overpopulation (prolifeaction.org/fact/overpopulation/). There is a funny statement here that the entire population of the earth can live comfortably in the territory of only one state of Texas and that the main problem is not related to the number of people, but to the excessive consumption of resources and that we need to fight not with overpopulation of the planet, but with how many resources it is the population consumes. There is certainly some logic to this approach, but the picture of eight billion people living in straw huts in the state of Texas is quite depressing.
Let's look at the website of another organization, NRLC (National Right to Life, nrlc.org/abortion/wdlb). Here it is stated that a single-celled zygote is already an individual, since it will soon turn into an adult. In our opinion, we must add to this statement all the sperm, which can just as well one day turn into a wonderful individual, and that on this basis all men should be imprisoned for mass murder. Next comes the statement that the life of an individual begins at the moment of fertilization, to which one can reasonably argue that without ejaculation and ovulation, fertilization will not occur, and therefore, the beginning of life can be considered the release of sperm from the urethra or the release of an egg into the fallopian tube.
Let us not forget that we have never been able to find any rational evidence that the zygote is anything more alive, much less possessing more consciousness (soul), than the sperm or egg individually. On the other hand, it is completely understandable why supporters of the Pro-life movement are forced to recognize such a single-celled formation as a zygote as an individual. After all, if they had set a certain period after which the embryo would receive human status, say, after the third week of pregnancy, then the inevitable question would immediately arise: what exactly happened at that moment? How is the embryo at the beginning of the fourth week fundamentally different from the same embryo at the end of the third week? They would not be able to answer this question. Therefore, just like the church and, undoubtedly, for the same reason, pro-life insists that a mucous formation the size of a tenth of a millimeter is already a full-fledged person, with a soul and the right to have a lawyer.
But on the website of the organization "PRO-LIFE ACTION MINISTRIES", plam.org, with a large black cross on the main page, we could not find a page on which members of this organization would bother to somehow clearly formulate their point of view.
Let's go further, take the Pro Life Europe website (prolifeeurope.org). Here's what they write:
Biology has established several criteria by which it determines the existence of life. If you have all the characteristics or at least most of them, you have a living being in front of you. But what constitutes a living being? In our throw-away culture we sleepwalk from one day to the next and watch inactively how our common home – the earth – is destroyed. Where did we take the wrong turn?
The people who wrote this are very far from biology. Life as a concept is not at all reduced to “living being in front of you” and the criteria by which its presence is determined mainly relate to biochemistry.
The slogan of this organization is “Life is life from conception until natural death. No exceptions.” Again, as in all previous cases, in the opinion of this organization, one hundred percent supported by the church, dead sperm and dead eggs give rise to a “living” zygote.
Why hasn't an organization to protect sperm rights been created yet? After all, as we found out, neither the sperm nor the egg carry any “spark of life” and the “miracle” that occurs during conception comes down to the exchange of genetic information. They are as alive in themselves as the zygote formed after their fusion. Unfortunately, we did not find an intelligible answer to this question on any of the websites of numerous pro-life organizations. And, to be honest, none of these organizations actually raises such a question. In addition to the same slogans, they are united by the fact that they all actively collect donations. It is unclear where this money goes, since none of the organizations expresses any intention to directly adopt the children it “saved.”
Thus, it is obvious that the ban on abortion is rarely associated with arguments dictated by reason, and is essentially a purely emotional issue, supported only by religious arguments. This problem must be solved by increasing the level of education and lowering the degree of the religious paradigm in society.
In conclusion, let's try to imagine a situation where a mother is forced to give birth against her wishes, in fear that otherwise she will face severe punishment. Will it be good for a child who was not wanted to go through life, who will most likely be deprived of maternal love, affection and care? Who will not be able or simply will not be given a good education, and whose views will be mainly determined by its absence? How will he grow up, who will he turn into?