MAY YOU LIVE TO SEE FIFTEEN DAYS

It seems internationally scientists are trying to establish fourteen days as the amount of time a person needs to live after conception before they are considered to be a human being. This is a fortunate discovery. With this clear-cut determination that means that experiments and such things as the harvesting of stem cells can be performed with no hint of moral lines being crossed. Being several decades past this mark I find myself rather relieved. I do feel for the preforteenthday non-humans however. I picture them (not that, I suppose, there is a “them” yet) sort of like the turtles that are born on the beach in the hundreds of thousands only to find most of their number decimated by hungry birds as they make their way to the safety of the water.

I was conceived back in the day when human beings were still human beings those first fourteen days. Lucky thing that. It seems rather poor sportsmanship to chip off one’s humanity at the beginning of one’s life. It would be fairer to declare someone un-human, say, at the last fourteen days of their lives. At least then they could have enjoyed eating trans fatty, deep-fried, foods and watching television re-runs.

It isn’t that preforteenthdayers don’t have everything they need to be humans yet. Regular scientists, not those Catholic ones, have pretty much come to an agreement that everything is there for the totality of a human person at conception. Already determined is the color of your eyes, if you will have a button nose, and barring outside influences how athletic you will be. Which all goes to show that I was pretty much predestined to be bald and only moderately intelligent from the get go. Wicked thing that.

So it is, perhaps, that preforteenthdayers are simply too small, too un-people-like looking, and don’t yet pay taxes. Not that anyone would judge the worth of another human being simply by their productivity, looks, or monetary worth or political influence. We are past all that now. It is simply that they are non-human. This should not surprise us too much. This is a very handy designation used throughout all of history to help us understand that it is Okay to treat other non-beings in such a way. Since they are not humans, we are not doing anything wrong. This has been a particularly helpful thing when needing slaves or are fighting an enemy, or when needing to do human experimentation.

So if both regular and Catholic scientists want to do experiments which would destroy that which does not exist for the 13 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds, their cause is a noble one. This might possibly help bring quality of life to mankind – unless, of course, you happen to be in the unfortunate position of being one of the ones not to make it past 14 days. But regular and Catholic scientists alike doing so one second past 15 days, and you have what we call in the big, beautiful (relatively speaking), and tax paying world as murder.

Besides, if we didn’t make this distinction, what would we do with all of these tiny humans sitting around in freezer drawers everywhere? Those pesky non-humans would just be a nuisance if born. It would be like the tenth plague in reverse. It is only acting responsibly that scientist have learned not only how to create life outside of the womb, but have also found a way of disposing of those preforteenthday non-humans. I only wish nuclear scientists, both regular and Catholic, would do the same thing with nuclear energy waste. Maybe we could declare nuclear energy water and just dump it in the ocean. That might do the trick.