Pre-Persons - Philip K. Dick

My wife and I were having a fantastic conversation with some new friends of ours last night over ice cream and as both my wife and our friend are about 10 weeks pregnant, the conversation inevitably turned to babies and the mystery of birth. I now have a sonogram image taken this past Wednesday night at UK Hospital. I was amazed in the way only an expectant father can be when confronted with the irrefutable proof that the small swell in his wife's belly actually contains a small person. There are little legs, little fingers, and a little white flashing of light on the screen where the heart beat shows. With two expectant mothers it's not unusual to touch on abortion as a dessert-conversation and we found our selves there near the end of the evening. I recalled a brilliant short story by Philip Dick, one of my favorite authors, called "The Pre-Persons." The point being who has the right to say when life (or personhood) begins or ends? From abortion, to organ harvesting, the human being is treated with profoundly less respect each passing year. If the body is a temple, then abortion surely must be murder in the cathedral and organ harvesting is looting.

I'm currently finishing an interesting book by Bruce Sterling called the Schismatrix, which chronicles the post-human world where technology has taken two opposing views of the body. The Mechs favor mechanical augmentation of the human form, prolonging life through prosthesis. The Shapers favor genetics and bilogical augmentation and rejuvenation. THe competing ideologies are at a fever pitch in Sterlings universe. Each considering the other an abomination and afront to human nature. It seems to bear on this issue in the context it ought to occur in. Forget the oppression of women and the Bible for a second, the sanctity of the human body is at stake. To their credit, Sterling's competing ideologies each have some merit. Yet, the current death-penalty-abortion-living-will-euthanasia argument lacks a direct confrontation of the issue: What is a human being? or perhaps, what is being human? Terms like embryo, neomort, vegitable, fetus... they all do one thing and that is to strip the humanity from a body. This process is entirely "intellectual" by someone other than the subject of discussion. They say when a serial killer abducts a person, the goal of investigators is to try to prevent the killer from ignoring that their victim is a person. Put the parents on TV, pictures of their past, say their name repeatedly. A killer needs to forget the humanity to kill. So the first goal of any killing is to strip the humanity from the target. "This isn't a person in a coma, it's a vegitable, a neomort, and organ farm... The person is gone... we keep the heart beating and the lungs breathing to prolong the viability of the organs for transplant." "It's not a baby, it's an embryo, a lump of cells, a tumor, we're extracting a tumor." You could say the same thing about Death Row, a cancer on society that needs to be removed... The only real difference is the innocence of the party. Landing on Death Row, means you've been tried as a criminal and deamed unfit for society by something you've actually done. The plight of the neomorts and aborted fetuses is one of innocence. They haven't committed any crimes... it is simply their existence which allows them to be stripped of their humanity.

A good resource for this topic is of course The Human Body Shop: The Cloning, Engineering, and Marketing of Life by Andrew Kimbrell. Well worth the read if your interested in such things. However, Philip K. Dick's words still stand out the clearest in my mind when the issue comes up. I can't recall which of the contemporary collections of short stories "The Pre-Persons" inhabits, but I found an excerpt online that sums up the logic that makes Dick a brilliant thinker:

Philip K Dick excerpts from "The Pre-persons" short story in "The Little Black Box" volume 5 of the collected stories of Philip K Dick, London , Gollancz, 1990.

"I know I'm no different, he thought , than two years ago when I was just a little kid; if I have a soul now like the law says, then I had a soul then, or else we have no souls - the only real thing is just a horrible metallic-painted truck with wire over its windows carrying off kids their parents no longer want, parents using an extension of the old abortion law that let them kill an unwanted child before it came out: because it had no 'soul' or 'identity', it could be sucked out by a vacuum system in less than two minutes. A doctor could do a hundred a day, and it was legal because the unborn child wasn't 'human'. He was a pre-person. Just like this truck now; they merely set the date forward as to when the soul entered."
"Why is it, he wondered, that the more helpless a creature, the easier it was for some people to snuff it? Like a baby in the womb; the original abortions, 'pre-partums,' or 'pre-persons' they were called now. How could they defend themselves?
Who would speak for them? All those lives, a hundred by each doctor a day....and all helpless and silent and then just dead...
And so a little thing that wanted to see the light of day is vacuumed out in less than two minutes. And the doctor goes on to the next chick."
"This postpartum abortion scheme and the abortion laws before it where the unborn child had no legal rights - it was removed like a tumor. Look what it's come to. If an unborn child can be killed without due process, why not a born one? What I see in common in both cases is their helplessness; the organism that is killed had no chance, no ability, to protect itself."
"So much easier when the other person - I should say pre-person - is floating and dreaming in the amniotic fluid and knows nothing about how to nor the need to hit back. Where did the motherly virtues go to? he asked himself. When mothers especially protected what was small and weak and defenseless?"
"The whole mistake of the pro-abortion people from the start, he said to himself, was the arbitrary line they drew. An embryo is not entitled to American Constitutional rights and can be killed, legally, by a doctor. But a fetus was a "person", with rights, at least for a while; and then the pro-abortion crowd decided that even a seven month fetus was not "human" and could be killed, legally, by a licensed doctor. And, one day, a newborn baby - it is a vegetable; it can't focus its eyes, it understands nothing, not talks... the pro-abortion lobby argued in court, and won, with their contention that a newborn baby was only a fetus expelled by accident or organic processes from the womb. But, even then, where was the line to be drawn finally? When the baby smiled its first smile? When it spoke its first word or reached for its initial time for a toy it enjoyed? The legal line was pushed back and back. And now the most savage and arbitrary definition of all: when it could perform 'higher math'."
"The Church had long since - from the start, in fact - maintained that even the zygote, and the embryo that followed, was as sacred a life form as any that walked the earth. They had seen what would come of arbitrary definitions of 'Now the soul enters the body," or in modern terms, 'Now it is a person entitled to the full protection of the law like every one else'".