S
selylidne
Guest
This is a very minor thing, far below the efforts of those who provide crisis pregnancy clinics and similar active expressions of love. I have a few suggestions for deliberate cultural change toward pro-life thinking. This sort of thing may be at best like a tree that only bears fruit many years after planting.
First, since we believe that an individual’s life begins at conception, and science wholly agrees, I suggest we should begin celebrating our conception days instead of or in addition to our birthdays. If we call them “firstdays”, then it rolls off the tongue just as well as “birthdays”. The days of our conceptions, after all, really are exactly that: our first days. (Heh: You might even be able to argue that celebrating firstdays is feminist in the good way, as mothers are intimately aware of their children long before birth, while fathers generally feel more remotely connected until birth.) If you don’t know your firstday, you can always estimate. I suppose the biggest obstacle to this celebration would be some people’s squeamishness about conception and giving children certain details too early. But I think that obstacle is an attitude that can be easily overcome with practical options for what to tell a curious child. Although I’m an adult now, my mother was delighted at this suggestion and told me that she had felt a change and knew the very moment I first lived, and she had written the day down in her journal long ago.
The second suggestion will face more resistance. I suggest we give our age since our firstdays, not since our birthdays. It is, after all, much truer, and all truth is God’s truth. The resistance will come in two forms. First, people will have to admit to being older than they could otherwise claim, and our culture stigmatizes age. That’s a real problem, and the only way around it is probably another, deeper, and more difficult cultural change of valuing old age. Second, people will object that on legal forms they must still give their age since their birthday, and that either we should mindlessly follow the law or that having two ways to count age would be too confusing for people. Both of those objections are balderdash, of course. For example, millions of Chinese Americans have lived just fine with two ways to count their age, having neither legal problems with it nor miring their children in confusion.
The above two suggestions are intended to fix in the cultural mindset that we really did begin at conception. The following two suggestions are more personal, and are intended to fix in our minds the personhood of even the smallest.
The third isn’t new. Many couples already give their children names as soon as the pregnancy is discovered. This seems better to me than waiting until birth, unless you don’t know the sex of the child and intend to give a gender-specific name. One possible, although clumsy, workaround would be to give a gender-neutral middle name, then a gender-specific first name at birth or after sex determination.
I suppose the fourth suggestion has a bigger chance of being a bad idea, and I apologize if it is troubling. Students of biology know that a significant fraction of conceived children are spontaneously aborted. Many women have had miscarriages. I would encourage parents to always give these children names, and to number them among their children, and to pray for them.
First, since we believe that an individual’s life begins at conception, and science wholly agrees, I suggest we should begin celebrating our conception days instead of or in addition to our birthdays. If we call them “firstdays”, then it rolls off the tongue just as well as “birthdays”. The days of our conceptions, after all, really are exactly that: our first days. (Heh: You might even be able to argue that celebrating firstdays is feminist in the good way, as mothers are intimately aware of their children long before birth, while fathers generally feel more remotely connected until birth.) If you don’t know your firstday, you can always estimate. I suppose the biggest obstacle to this celebration would be some people’s squeamishness about conception and giving children certain details too early. But I think that obstacle is an attitude that can be easily overcome with practical options for what to tell a curious child. Although I’m an adult now, my mother was delighted at this suggestion and told me that she had felt a change and knew the very moment I first lived, and she had written the day down in her journal long ago.
The second suggestion will face more resistance. I suggest we give our age since our firstdays, not since our birthdays. It is, after all, much truer, and all truth is God’s truth. The resistance will come in two forms. First, people will have to admit to being older than they could otherwise claim, and our culture stigmatizes age. That’s a real problem, and the only way around it is probably another, deeper, and more difficult cultural change of valuing old age. Second, people will object that on legal forms they must still give their age since their birthday, and that either we should mindlessly follow the law or that having two ways to count age would be too confusing for people. Both of those objections are balderdash, of course. For example, millions of Chinese Americans have lived just fine with two ways to count their age, having neither legal problems with it nor miring their children in confusion.
The above two suggestions are intended to fix in the cultural mindset that we really did begin at conception. The following two suggestions are more personal, and are intended to fix in our minds the personhood of even the smallest.
The third isn’t new. Many couples already give their children names as soon as the pregnancy is discovered. This seems better to me than waiting until birth, unless you don’t know the sex of the child and intend to give a gender-specific name. One possible, although clumsy, workaround would be to give a gender-neutral middle name, then a gender-specific first name at birth or after sex determination.
I suppose the fourth suggestion has a bigger chance of being a bad idea, and I apologize if it is troubling. Students of biology know that a significant fraction of conceived children are spontaneously aborted. Many women have had miscarriages. I would encourage parents to always give these children names, and to number them among their children, and to pray for them.