pro-life

as in pro-human

Pro-life. For many years, I thought of that as an arrogant term. Does that mean others are pro-death? (I understand there are some who actually are pro-death, but one hopes they are a miniscule percentage!) I believed I am pro-life, at least when it comes to opposition to the death penalty and almost complete opposition to war. I can’t say I am a pacifist, but I think there has to be a really high bar for one nation to engage in hostilities against another. There are other issues that might be covered by the umbrella of “pro-life,” but I won’t address them here.

Of course, the primary meaning of pro-life regards abortion. While still in college, I began to see abortion as not desirable, but at least necessary in some cases. The big three are rape, incest, and health of the mother. It seems that most Americans would agree with that. The trickier circumstances would be what I considered to be actual “pro-choice.” These are the fuzzier situations and seem to be the majority. What to do? How far into a pregnancy is abortion a legitimate choice?

Does pro-life extend to the life experience of the mother, who might have been impregnated during unwanted sex, even if it couldn’t legally be considered rape? Would another child deny her opportunities that would not be a problem for the father? Some people say “no,” while others say “yes.” Right now, I will leave this subject for another time. (I know I not have not, by any stretch of the imagination, addressed this in a way it deserves.)

Stepping back, can we see pro-life in a deeper, more philosophical context?

This month at the University of Michigan Medical School, as part of the graduation festivities, they held what’s known as the White Coat Ceremony. The highlight is a speech given by a faculty member selected by students and peers. This year it was Dr. Kristin Collier. [her speech begins at the 1:46 mark]

She didn’t use the term, but Dr. Collier spoke of versions of reality. A couple of times, she jokingly said maybe she should have gone to business school! She celebrated the humanities — anthropology, sociology, philosophy, theology, and others — as helping us ask “the big questions,” as she put it, about life itself, with all the gratitude and grief it carries.

As one who took loads of liberal arts in college, I wholeheartedly affirm those subjects are pro-life, as in pro-human!

She emphasized the danger of treating ourselves and patients like machines. Beware of “seeing your patients as just a bag of blood and bones or human life as just molecules in motion.” Dr. Collier said, “You are not technicians taking care of complex machines, but human beings taking care of other human beings.”

She referred to Aristotle’s vision of types of knowledge, one of which is techne. We get our word “technical” from it. She noted, “Traditional medical education often doesn’t teach health as shalom but health as techne.” I will admit, her using the word shalom took me by surprise. I afterwards discovered she had become a Christian, baptized many years after her husband.

Collier said medical education too often emphasizes the technical aspects, rather than recognizing the patient as a human being, with all that includes. Technology is well and good and vitally important, but shalom is the all-expansive blessing of peace and well-being pervading creation.

Is it pro-life to recognize and to treat each other with respect, even with holiness? Perhaps there can be a happy union of pro-life and pro-choice in the deepest sense of those words!

In these past couple of years, I have had to re-learn what respect and holiness look like. (It’s an ongoing lesson!) It is a self-defeating enterprise to identify what we are against rather than what we are for — and to assume we know what “the other” is before truly engaging at a humble, questioning level.

“Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but do not notice the log in your own eye?”

Perhaps the best way — or at least, a very good way — to affirm life is to tell stories. We tell our story. We invite others to tell their stories. It takes patience to listen to a story. Sometimes we want to hear the story again! Nonetheless, we too often opt for arguing and shaming and forcing. That’s no way to invite shalom.

That’s no way to celebrate life! That’s no way to celebrate being human!