Who is really pro-life?

Introduction

Occasionally a person, in the course of conversation with me, has made such a comment as Well, of course, you're a very spiritual person so you're obviously pro-life, aren't you.

What these people actually mean isn't pro-life (which well-nigh all of us are), but anti-abortion and anti-euthanasia — and indeed, more to the point, anti-death.

This is the same sort of dishonesty as we get in the UK from the pro-fox-hunting lobby who often describe themselves not as pro-fox-hunting but as 'for the countryside', as though the countryside and its well-being depended on fox-hunting (i.e., as a 'sport' — actually taking pleasure in hunting-down and killing).

The aim is to cause confusion and try to give the impression that their views and their campaign have a respectability and purpose for the human race that in fact they lack.

Yes, abortion and euthanasia are serious matters, but the issues have been hijacked by right-wing 'religious' (actually political) groups that want to impose their own strict and rigidly defined moral code upon others.

Abortion and voluntary euthanasia are complex issues in practical terms, and condemning them and seeking to ban them reflects a simplistic moralistic view and not a true understanding of the real ethical and down-to-earth practical issues involved. As you will see in a moment, I'm most certainly not pro-abortion, but neither am I 'anti-abortion', and I'm not taking sides in the highly emotive debate on the subject between polarized factions. The real need here, as in all other areas of our life experience, is to set aside held beliefs / opinions and to get rational.

When you're being genuinely rational, instead of getting on your emotional high horses about an issue and aligning with some faction relating to it, with an open mind you examine the issue in order to gain proper understanding of it and the various wants and needs involved, keeping aware that 'wants' and needs aren't at all the same thing. Also, if you're being rational, you recognise that if a person chooses to make a poor choice in their life, unless it's impacting significantly on you or the community in general in a harmful way, that's that person's business and NOT yours!

The confused issue of supposed 'free choice'

The issue of allowing / prohibiting euthanasia, suicide and more particularly abortion is further confused by people's confused and irrational notions of 'free choice'. While I empathize with people wanting to maximize free choice in their lives, the real need is to disregard the messages coming from opinionated factions on the subject, and actually to get rational instead.

Through approaching each issue in an open-minded, flexible and rational way you actually maximize the genuine free choice available in each individual situation, whereas applying any belief or dogma minimizes it and seeks to get everyone living in psychological straitjackets.

It's not that freedom of choice is actually wrong or harmful in itself, but the people who are most strongly arguing or campaigning for it are generally doing so on an irrational, agenda-driven basis, usually in an attempt to get various harmful behaviours allowed, which actually need to be stopped or at least curbed. For this reason, it's best that 'freedom of choice' arguments be taken out of the arena when we're considering the subjects of this article, and we stick with an aware and humane consideration of the real personal needs in the various situations.

There's a real need, then, for people to be educated in an objective manner about these simple matters, so that they can then make their own decisions on the basis of proper information and whatever love and clear thought they can manifest. Undoubtedly those who aren't well tuned-in to their innate love and clear thought would still follow the line of Okay, if I get pregnant I'll have an abortion, as though having an abortion were as obvious and straightforward an act as having a crap. To such a person a new human life is seen as an unwanted waste product of the supposedly all-important sex act, and fit only for the lavatory or clinical waste bin.

Inevitably the anti-abortionists would want to stop these women from aborting their foetuses, but unfortunately the anti-abortion lobbyists have scant understanding of life and death, and indeed of ethical behaviour.

True love and clear thought aren't rigid like the horrendously unloving 'moral codes' that religious lobbies seek to impose on people. It's so very easy to say Thou shalt not take another person's or your own life, and impose that as a rigid rule for everyone to abide by without ever getting to understand individual circumstances and the true significance of life and death and living and dying. Following a rule or regulation isn't the manifestation of love nor of clear thought, and altogether not a manifestation of anything positive, for genuine love and clear thought come from within, and you gain these through making your life decisions out of a process of self attunement and self examination.

Here's an interesting question for the religious factions who are calling themselves 'pro-life'. If it's so important that all life be preserved regardless of any deeper issues, how is it that what you call 'God' or some equivalent name throws away human lives by the myriad, or at least allows those lives to be thrown away?

The really aware and clear-minded person understands that death is an intrinsic part of the life process, and that death opens the doorway to new life — so that death isn't the end of anything except one particular set of life experiences. Death, like everything else, is intrinsically neither good nor bad, but simply itself, like sleep or indeed a nose or a belly-button.

Education of people with regard to the issues involved in abortion is one thing, but banning of abortion is an attempt to take away people's opportunities to develop a deep sense of personal responsibility and respect for other individuals through learning from their 'wrong' decisions. If you don't allow people to do anything that you regard as 'wrong', you're making them into puppets and not beings of love, empathy, clear thought and true responsibility. Indeed, in the event of a ban, many would just 'go underground' to have their abortions done illegally, and so endanger themselves.

Of those who give in to the pressure to keep an unwanted foetus, many would be very unsatisfactory parents because they have an unwanted baby. That of course would also be a useful 'learning opportunity' for the reluctant parent, but at the expense of the unwanted infant, who would have an unhappy and in some cases abusive upbringing.

The anti-abortionists are particularly lacking in love, empathy and understanding with regard to desperate situations such as when a woman has conceived following being raped. Is she then really to be condemned to bearing the child of her attacker? If she's to be so condemned, then in what sort of home and upbringing and emotional environment is that child likely to grow up? — Okay, let's take the child away from such supposedly 'damaged-goods' parents and put them 'into care'! Would that really give them a worthwhile life?

I'm most certainly not suggesting that abortion should be an automatic option in such cases, because here and there would be women who would truly want and love the child despite the adverse and traumatic circumstances of its conception. But for the majority of women, to be forced to bear the child of their attacker would be a monstrous second violation.

Euthanasia (voluntary)

Euthanasia is right when it's the best choice and wrong when it's not the best choice! — That's common sense, surely!

At the other end of the life process, the undue extension of a person's physical life is highly problematical and not compassionate at all. It's based in the materialistic ignorance of reincarnation and the need for a person, when their time has come, to let go of the set of experiences that constitute the current lifetime.

Trying to delay that person's death is simply forcing that person to suffer or at least to exist in a captive, undignified state (which is actually a very fundamental sort of suffering), and therefore isn't pro-life in any way whatsoever. Rather than pro-life, it's against-death, which is a negative, fear-based attitude. It also gives the dying person the scary message that death is something to try and avoid, which is very much at variance from the truth and from what (s)he needs to hear at that point.

When a person is in some sort of 'terminal agony', it's very important that the person receives warmth and emotional support from other people to help that person's physical existence still to be bearable. But what I'd say in such a situation is "Why the eff are you keeping that person in that dreadful state to start with? Can't you see that her time has come and she needs to die NOW?".

Typically, at least in Western cultures, a dying person is seen as having no right to self determination, and this needs to change. It can be said that the person is no longer of sound mind, but nonetheless, if (s)he is crazed by terminal suffering, and wants to end it, then where is the love and good sense in not complying with their desperate wish in their personal agony and enabling them to gain release from what is now the hell of this lifetime?

As I explain in How to Die Peacefully and with Dignity, NOBODY is truly meant to have to hang onto life in a terminal situation, beyond where they can maintain a dignified state without significant suffering. It's their choice and theirs alone, as to when is the most appropriate time for them to die.

For doctors and other medical workers, who are apparently in an ethical 'grey area' because of most people being too attached to life to spontaneously die 'the way Nature intended' without waiting for their bodies to completely fail, there's actually a breathtakingly simple method that these medics could learn.

It would enable them to tell precisely what is the most appropriate time of death for any specific person who either says they want to die or is too far gone to be able to give an indication on that issue, and what would be the most appropriate means of assisting them to die.

— And that's with not a trace of ethical problem (though of course it wouldn't be allowed under our currently crass legislation relating to various medical matters). That method is Helpfulness Testing.

With Helpfulness Testing, a doctor could connect with the person's non-physical aspects and then do Helpfulness Testing on the person's behalf — effectively interrogating that person's deepest aspects as to whether she needs to die yet, and to establish what sort of assistance would be of greatest benefit to her.

SHE is the expert on this — NOT the doctor. The doctor could thus find out whether the best assistance would be simply in the form of loving counselling on how to die 'tonight in my sleep', or whether administration of a 'euthanasia' drug would be best, and, if so, exactly what drug to use. Just ending life support is NEVER a humane or ethical option, because of the suffering it ALWAYS causes. Administer a euthanasia drug and wait for the person to lose consciousness first, and then remove the life support!

Using a euthanasia drug is far from ideal, but it's simply a matter of pragmatism — using the most humane and least harmful of the available options. As long as euthanasia is used ONLY on the basis of awarely, rigorously and vigilantly applied Helpfulness Testing when connected to the patient's own non-physical aspects, so that the doctor actually knows from the patient herself what's in her best interests, there can't be even a trace of ethical problem about euthanasia.

The ethical problems come when a medic or other person uses his / her ordinary 'mind' to decide whether to end a person's life.

A person who has fully and deeply learnt how to die properly would never be an issue for medics, for that person would simply die peacefully (normally in his/her sleep) at a time of his/her inner choosing, before a terminal undignified or suffering state could become really established.

Suicide

Suicide is wrong when somebody else is doing it by a means that you're not using to do it

Apparently suicide is okay and to be allowed as long as you do it gradually, such as by smoking or/and regular drinking of alcohol, and don't actually think of yourself as committing suicide even though, at least in the back of your mind, you know perfectly well that in the long term you're killing yourself.

People generally are thus very hypocritical about killing oneself. In fact, as well as the ethical considerations for seeking to prevent people from committing suicide, there's also a strong ethical case for allowing people to do it, for it comes down to free choice and self determination. This latter is tacitly accepted as people are allowed to smoke or (in most countries) regularly to drink alcohol to excess. (— though I should add that any alcohol drinking at all is excess, in that it's harmful and in some degree shortening your life expectancy.)

If a person isn't harming others by doing so, there's an ethical case for his being allowed the choice to end his life. All too often people's reason for trying to stop somebody from killing himself is simply garbage-sourced control agenda — minding anyone's business but one's own.

The reality is that if a person is wanting to commit suicide, (s)he is suffering and seeking release from that suffering. If such a person does go ahead and 'does it', that isn't the end of that person's consciousness, which would eventually reincarnate, and the world doesn't fall apart because the person has 'done it' and no longer exists — though it would be a sad reflection on the general lack of available emotional support that such a thing has had to happen.

I'm not promoting nor condoning suicide at all, but I am at least being honest about its not being simply a dreadful sin that must be stopped at all cost. In any case, just as with people in terminal situations, the smart approach to suicide is NOT through a blanket rule or law that Thou shalt not commit suicide, but to carry out Helpfulness Testing to interrogate the particular person's deepest aspects on what are that person's real needs at that time*. You can thus determine whether that person needs to be directly stopped from a particular suicide attempt, completely left alone to 'get on with it', or have Social Services called in, or whatever.

Thus if you rigorously and vigilantly use Helpfulness Testing (as presented on this site, and heeding all the cautions and caveats that I give about its use) on individual people in the present time, you can completely do without any Thou shalt not… mentality and actually respond most appropriately and constructively to each situation on the basis of each person's real, underlying needs.

What is so troublesome about rules and so-called moral codes is that they don't allow for the uniqueness of each person and his particular life situation.

One particular need for anyone who is feeling suicidal is emotional support from other people, and this is all too often lacking, for still few people know how really to give effective emotional support, or have the sort of depth of awareness that would enable them to do so. This is an important part of the means to remove the motivation for suicide — not condemning a person (by simply preventing the suicide) to unendurable suffering of which you have no experience nor understanding yourself but only a sense of your own rightness in your opinion.

However, the methodology that I present in Healing and self-actualization — The safest and quickest way, whether in whole or part, is particularly important for any would-be suicider to be put in touch with, for therein lie the means to address and resolve the underlying causes of just about any 'suicide' issue and bring happiness and a real positive sense of joyful purpose into anyone's life. Actually by far the best starter page for such people is Crisis emergency self-help — Life upturn the SMART way.

I'm not falling into the popular trap of saying 'right' or 'wrong' to these issues. The true way forward is ALWAYS to find out what are the real needs of each individual — which can be established through careful use of Helpfulness Testing. Rules and laws, being rigid, are always asses, which violate people in very much the sort of ways that those very rules and laws were supposed to be preventing.

As for the so-called pro-life lobbyists, I assume they're all non-smoking, more or less non-alcohol-drinking healthily-eating peace-promoters…? Do they campaign for healthy living, banning smoking and drinking alcohol, and banning the confectionery industry, so to lengthen our lives? — You see, rigid rules make straightaway for hypocrisy, because the rules tend to get broken or simply not be applied wherever they aren't convenient for the religious / political / personal agendas of the people supposedly applying them.

So, who are the most genuinely pro-life people? — Of course, those who are on a comprehensive genuine self actualization process. Their whole life experience and process is an affirmation of life, greatly aided by their deeper understanding of life and death, and their lack of fear of the latter. Every one of those people (I hope!) has the common sense to keep well clear of the so-called 'pro-life' lobby, and (I hope!) the common sense each to die at a time that makes best sense for them, rather than at a time that any old Tom, Dick or doctor, 'pro-lifer' or imaginary 'God' seeks to dictate!