My body is mine, so what I do with it is my business

Motherhood is perhaps the greatest act of altruism there is, but it is still dangerous and we should not force someone down that path, says Waga Odongo. FILE | NATION

What you need to know:

  • Motherhood is perhaps the greatest act of altruism there is, but it is still dangerous and we should not force someone down that path. 
  • I am a body and the master of it. We are chained to a corpse because we are the corpse. No one should have the right to tell you what to do with the body that is you.

The central idea in many religions is that the body and the mind are, somehow, made of different stuff. We are told that we are animated by some ethereal substance and are literally ghosts trapped in a fleshy machine.

We are corpses, but for some holy ghost that acts as a puppeteer. This idea of our supposed dual nature is important for all of us to consider because it partially feeds the idea that we are not the masters of our bodies, but merely stewards.

The claim of spectres trapped in cadavres is testable and scientific advances make it deceptively easy to look for a soul and determine whether it is there or not.

Indeed, CAT and MRI scans have localised various areas in the brain which control our emotions, movements, and biological processes. Damage to certain areas of the brain can render us mute or unable to read, showing that they almost definitely control these processes.

Damage to the parietal lobe, for example, makes it impossible for a person to spell. Different moods can be altered by chemical and electrical impulses. 

IMMUTABLE LAWS

Our minds arise entirely from the product of physical phenomena, and there is no reason to think otherwise. Sadly, there is no space in our heads for the soul to inhabit, and no job left for it to do.

Everything inside us obeys the immutable laws of physics. I think that, as an explanation-loving species, we were so in awe of our physical and mental construction that we had to imbue ourselves with magical qualities to explain it.

Talking about the spirit is not only an unnecessary distraction, it is also downright lazy and ignorant. Your body is a temple, but not one of spirit.

Our bodies are us. The mind is as the brain works and is merely a creation of neural pathways. Indeed, there is nothing beyond our world of matter, no spirits caged in our bones.

I do not have a body; I am a body. Our bodies are us. My body is both me and mine. 

If our bodies are ours and us and not gifted to us, are we not, then, ultimate sovereigns over ourselves? Who should have a greater right than yourself to tell you what to do with your body? If you do not own the very meat that clings to your bones, what do you own? Can anyone renounce your own infallibility towards managing your body? 

If you own your body, why, for example, should there be a law against using it sexually for money or any other consideration? What moral reason does anyone have to tell you what to do with your body?

TRAUMATIC YEAR

A friend of mine has been through a traumatic year. Her mother had cancer and began wasting away before her very eyes. She had a particularly aggressive form of the disease that ate her from the inside out.

The medicines they were using to treat her also had horrible side effects. Her skin was inflamed and turned red due to radiation. She complained of immense pain. My friend talked of the challenges of mothering one’s own mother.

It made me appreciate just how wretched disease can be, how painful and helpless some illnesses can render us.

In the end, her mother was a human tub: You put food and nutrients at one end and it passes out through the other. It was a hopeless endeavour. By the time death came, she was already gone. It was all about stopping the pulse. The family suffered hellishly.

Suffering does not make us better or improve us in any way. In a moment of weakness, my friend hoped that her mother’s suffering could be shortened or stopped. Of course, her entreaties were directed to some unspecified “god” to end the suffering, which she later regretted.

There is an interesting scene in the documentary "How to Die in Oregon." After legally buying a lethal concoction that was prescribed for him by a doctor to end his life, a patient is told by the attendant to “have a good day.”

The choice of words seemed odd addressed to a person who had chosen to euthanize himself. Death is a logical conclusion to life that we should not be afraid of facing. 

INDIGNITY OF SUFFERING

The indignity of human suffering from disease makes the ability to decide when we want to go a necessity. We should all have a painless opt-out clause and our existence and preservation of life should be questions we are able to discuss without religious doctrine cropping up. There is nothing noble about human suffering.

I, for one, fear the mental decay and rotting from the inside. As a materialist through and through, I know that the carbon in me, the carbon that is me, will once again be absorbed by other organisms and will flow back into a great cycle of life. My constituent parts have been around for billions of years.

After they are no longer in me, they will be parts of other organisms. Perhaps one day the carbon that is me will even rise through the food chain back to the perch occupied by our primate species.

Non-existence does not bother me because I was not around for the first 4.6 billion years of the earth. And I will not be around for the next billion.

Death should not be — and is not — a worry, but pain is. It can be pointless and excruciating. It can kill you without making you stronger. There is no dignity in valiantly fighting your disease to a gory conclusion. There is more to life than merely having a flickering pulse. Quality of life is important.

We reserve the right to be able to organise our affairs and, in cases of terminal illness, organise our exit from this world in a safe environment. There should be an option to carefully, medically, and painlessly manage the end of the lives of terminally ill patients.

The person best able to decide whether a life is worth living is the person living it. It is your body and you should decide when you no longer want to be in it or be it.

The government should not have the right to tell you how to use your body.

OBSTETRICAL DILEMMA

Let us now look at abortion, another contentious issue. In determining whether abortion is right or wrong, we should consider what is known as the obstetrical dilemma.

This is simply the conflicting trends in evolution that have made human females walk upright while the size of our craniums kept getting bigger. These two conflicting paths have made sure that humans have terrible odds when it comes to giving birth.

Humans are more likely to die in childbirth than any other primate. Humans also need much more assistance while giving birth compared to other animals. For humans, pregnancy is very dangerous, potentially lethal, and a horrible experience.

Different goals and competing interests

We have an idealised concept of motherhood, but the truth is that it is not as pretty as we pretend it is.

The human placenta is different from those of other mammals and fuses the mother and the fetus. While it is designed to increase nutrients to the foetus, the connection also means that the foetus can actively manipulate the mother’s system to ensure that its supply of nutrients is prioritised.

During pregnancy, mother and child have different goals and competing interests. The mother wants to preserve her nutrients for the future, while the foetus ensures that she cannot prioritise her life over its own.

PARASITIC RELATIONSHIP

A foetus usually pumps the mother’s bloodstream with hormones to ensure that it receives more nutrients than it requires. It then passes along the father’s genetic material so that the mother ends up having different sets of genetic material.

This is a selfish action to ensure that it is harder for a woman to have children with other men apart from the father of her present child. The relationship between a mother and a foetus is more parasitic than symbiotic, if we are to be honest. 

A pregnancy is a personal issue. Our evolution makes pregnancy even more dangerous than for other species. We are lucky that the cause of all our problems, our big head, is also the solution to the problem.

Medical science has made it easier to assist women in childbirth. A pregnancy is risky and must be entered into freely. It happens in someone’s body and it should be that person’s decision whether it is carried to term or not.

The foetus, as we have seen, ruthlessly promotes its own interests and that of its father to the detriment of the mother. The mother should be allowed to consider whether she wants to carry a pregnancy to term.

DANGER OF MOTHERHOOD

Motherhood is perhaps the greatest act of altruism there is, but it is still dangerous and we should not force someone down that path. 

We could talk about the fact that abortion is banned and women are dying because of lack of access to an essential reproductive procedure. The religious will not allow sex education or contraception or advertisements on contraception.

Nor will they allow abortion. They will not listen to anything you have to say about euthanasia but let people suffer horrible indignities before they die. They will not allow you to use your body in a manner you see fit.

There is a feeling of religious sacredness attached to our bodies, that life is a gift from above, that we should think that life is sacred. These feelings are not true.  

I am a body and the master of it. We are chained to a corpse because we are the corpse. No one should have the right to tell you what to do with the body that is you.