My birthday is a week from today, but I can already say that 21st birthdays are overrated. In fact, all birthdays are overrated, especially the actual days when each of us came gushing out of his or her respective mother. A commonly used phrase is "the miracle of birth." What this miracle is I will never understand.
A miracle is supposed to be something that is extraordinarily unusual, inexplicable, impossible even. For early mankind, it may have seemed pretty miraculous that one plus one could equal three. But today, birth is just another everyday (every second, more like) phenomenon. We've acquired the ability to cause it, prevent it, outlaw it, circumvent it and even to look at the little suckers before they come out, all through routine scientific procedure. Not very miraculous.
Now this stings a bit, because we're really used to the idea of our existence being caused by a miracle. Western religion is based heavily on the idea of different origin for humans and the myriad other species of life on this planet. These ideas are deeply implanted in our culture, helping us to craft ridiculous stories about storks to explain reproduction to our children and creeping into our language, as in "the miracle of birth."
But if we agree that birth isn't quite the miracle we thought it was, we're really just subconsciously pushing the miracle somewhere else. Many people don't really believe that biology alone can explain what we are and many are, in fact, afraid of the consequences of this idea. With the abortion question, we've opened up entire realms of unanswerable questions as to when human life begins. At least, when does it become special and miraculous? When does the miracle take place?
Some say conception. That's ironic. We want so badly to be different from the animals which we see just as walking pieces of meat, yet we move the miracle to something that is caused by animalistic instincts. Moreover, this part of the process can be performed in a laboratory. In fact, we can make lots of unique genetic codes and put them in big freezers.
So we push the miracle off to some vague place in the development of a fetus. A friend of mine joked that since the Bush administration wants to give rights to fetuses, then my 21 years should have started well before my actual birth, making me of age to drink already. That unfortunately does not work. In order for something to be a miracle, it has to happen all at once and not at some unpredictable or highly contingent time. Since there's no clear moment when a fetus changes from a mass of cells to an intelligent being, we're left with the devastating conclusion that at some point we just can't tell whether the "miracle" has happened or not.
People shouldn't overuse words like "miracle." It's one thing to find everyday facts of nature fascinating and impressive. It's another to call them a word more often associated with the hand of God practicing its skywriting abilities. We need to be clear on something: are we implying that human reproduction is a hand-of-God type miracle or not?
If you don't mean it that way, why not just appreciate birth for what it is and drop the God-talk? If you do mean it that way, then why not be honest about how you truly feel? I've listened to anti-abortion propaganda for years, but always based on some pseudo-biological reason. Not once have I heard someone argue on the basis of their belief that God puts souls into zygotes or embryos or fetuses.
In any case, we're too used to calling reproduction a miracle, because we're implying that it's not something we have total control of. Now that we have the ability to control it pretty well, it's time to accept that responsibility, just as we must accept the responsibilities of all mankind's new-found abilities, like our ability to make other species extinct. Calling an action"playing God" is to deny that something is already in our power, and that ethics do not depend on pretending otherwise.
By now, global overpopulation is reaching ridiculous proportions, and it's resulting in famine, child slavery and a whole mess of other problems. I think it's time to stop celebrating every time a new hungry mouth pops onto the planet. Unless you're of a religious sect that takes "go forth and multiply" extremely literally or are racist enough to worry about the nation being overrun by Hispanics (the subject of Pat Buchanan's recent book, "The Death of the West"), why not tone down this senseless celebration of sexual reproduction? So I say we celebrate one birthday per lifetime to celebrate our making it that far. I think 100 is a nice round number, and living to 100 is actually an accomplishment.
In the meantime, we can deal with birthdays on an individual, personal level and each take the anniversary of our own date to call home and thank our mothers, right before we go out and get drunk.
