I was one of those kids who captured insects and took them outside rather than kill them. My dad had no idea when we went fishing that I wasn’t really putting a worm on my hook.
For some reason, when I was back in school, I found dissecting frogs in biology class to be particularly offensive. I felt I could look at charts of the inside of a frog there was no reason an animal had to be killed for me to learn what I needed for a 101 biology class.
It seemed to me, when we dissect a frog down to its parts, the one thing we don’t get to know is the frog. When I got to be a certain age I simply refused to participate in dissecting animals. Fortunately for me my teachers were kind enough to let me off the hook. They could have flunked me but they gave me alternative assignments.
This deep impulse to protect life made sense when I read Albert Schweitzer’s essays. He was trying to find a new foundation for ethics. He called his foundation “reverence for life.” I felt my own heart had been mapped out for me to see.
One would think someone so finicky about killing would not have grown up to be pro-choice, but meeting survivors of rape and assault help me realized that life is not so simple. Life feeds on life, which is why my early attempts at complete nonviolence were doomed to failure. There is no pristine sideline to be found in nature where one can remain harmless and innocent. In the real world life struggles with life. In the real world if we force the lion to lay down with the lamb one of them is in serious trouble.
Those who claim to be protecting the innocent unborn by passing anti-abortion laws are not necessarily being non-violent. Such laws can mean coercion for the person who is pregnant. Sometimes those coercive laws can cause injury to those who are pregnant. “Right to Life” laws can even lead to increased maternal mortality rates.
I still believe Schweitzer was right in his assumption that life is the gold standard of value for ethics, and so doing as little harm as possible to others is important. And, Gandhi is still the architect of my activism. But, I believe both of my life heroes (both men) were a bit naive and simplistic. “Life” is not found discretely packaged in individual forms. “Life” is one ecological whole that sometimes demands hard decisions.
Pregnancy has risks that I as a male did not understand. I now realize laws that risk the lives of fully developed human beings to protect the un-gestated is not really non-violent at all. For men to impose their simplistic views upon women in complicated and dangerous situations is its own form of violence.