The Vedic Observer
Transcendental Commentary on the Issues of the Day
Pro-Choice Sprouts
by Mathureśa dāsa (Port Royal, Pennsylvania)
The abortion debate has grown tedious, as flavorless as hour-old bubble gum. Pro-lifers march on Washington. demanding the overturn of Roe v. Wade, wailing that abortion is murder. Pro-choicers countermarch, equally emotional about a woman’s right to control her own body. It’s all so predictable. The standoff needs new life.
There’s some hope in the pro-lifers’ recent acts of civil disobedience, some excitement in seeing demonstrators carted off to jail. At least they’ve raised the conflict to a new level: they’re acting on the premise that America’s million-plus annual abortions are murder.
To increase the excitement, pro-choicers ought to up the ante too. If the fetus isn’t a human being, or even a living being, they should take that to heart. If, as they say, the religious talk about pregnancy being sacred (the Bhāgavatam, for instance, says that the individual person, or soul—the living force in every body, fetal and full-grown—enters the womb at the time of conception!) is just that, talk, then answering “murder” charges is a waste of time. a petty, rear-guard action. Pro-choicers need to take the offensive.
As Jonathan Swift hinted more than two hundred fifty years ago in A Modest Proposal, unwanted pregnancies can have their uses. If veal is the tenderest of all cow flesh, how tender a fetus must be. Get fetal flesh into the American diet—as fetus burgers, say—and Americans would be far less inclined to protest abortion. Why do the animal rights people make so much more noise about cruelty to seals, minks, cats, dogs, and rabbits than about cruelty to chickens, pigs, and cows? Because everyone, including some animal rights people, eats chickens, pigs, and cows. So get everyone munching on fetus and you pull the rug right out from under the pro-lifers.
Fetus cuisine has great potential. Think of what it could do to revitalize the hamburger industry, or any sector of the food industry. Health food specialists rave about the nutritive value of wheat sprouts, and what is a fetus but a comparably germinal ball of flesh?
Why worry? Most of us make no moral distinction between eating sprouts and eating animal flesh, so why distinguish between animal and fetus barbecues? Advances have already been made in the medical use of fetal products, and the Europeans, we hear, already have fetal-based cosmetics on the market. If we can smear it on our skin, surely we can put it in our mouths.
As Swift so eloquently proposed, this creative use of children, or, in the modern context fetuses, would also serve to increase a man’s affection for his wife, and for women in general, since everyone knows that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. A fetus industry would also provide a steady source of income for unwed mothers, thus greatly decreasing welfare rolls.
In any case, let’s not dally around debating “murder” with the pro-lifers. Take the initiative, as they have. Go to jail, if necessary, as they have. Demonstrate to the world the depth of your conviction that the fetus isn’t human, and that eating fetus is therefore no more unusual than eating veal and sprouts.
A Farce Of Fate
by Dhīra Govinda dāsa (Tel Aviv)
The doctor was a genial, cultured man. He had just given a donation in exchange for some of Śrīla Prabhupāda’s books. I was in Sakhnine, a small Muslim village nestled in the hills of northern Israel. As I was leaving his office. I noticed in the waiting room a large calendar displaying a photo of a teenage Palestinian boy gracefully posed like a little league pitcher about to deliver strike three. His hand didn’t clasp a baseball, however, but a sizable rock. And his target wasn’t the catcher’s glove of a playmate, but the vulnerable body of an Israeli soldier, who for him represented the enemy that had been oppressing him and his family for many years.
It’s the Middle East. As devotees of Kṛṣṅa in this part of the world, we interact extensively with many peoples—Jew, Muslim, Christian, Israeli, and Palestinian. In each of these groups, we meet many good people, such as the doctor, who are sincerely concerned about the distressing situation in which they’re living. So why all the difficulty?
According to the philosophy of Kṛṣṅa consciousness, the cause of the difficulty is the bodily conception of life. A person is the spiritual spark, or soul, within the body, and has no inherent connection with the body or its designations. The soul is eternally a servant of God, Kṛṣṅa. From the Bhagavad-gītā we learn that the body is a temporary covering of the soul. We are not Arab or Israeli, communist or capitalist; we are God’s eternal servants who are foolishly playing different roles in different dresses in this material world.
In the north of Israel live the Druze, a religious sect that accepts the concept of transmigration of the soul, or reincarnation. As stated in the Bhagavad-gītā, “As the embodied soul continuously passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death.” Many Druze claim to remember their previous lives. One of them might say. “Yes, my father died a few years back: now he’s a four-year-old boy in Yanook [a nearby village].” Some Druze even claim to remember that their previous death occurred while fighting against the Israeli army in a country such as Syria. If this is true, just imagine the irony! A man who previously fought against the Israelis now proudly wears the uniform of the Israeli military forces.
According to the Bhagavad-gītā, “Whatever state of being one remembers when he quits his body, that state he will attain without fail.” Thus, the rock-throwing Palestinian youth who is stopped by a bullet might take birth in suburban Tel Aviv, as his concentration at the time of death was on an Israeli soldier. And at the age of eighteen, his army commander will instruct him to guard his zone against “those vicious Palestinian boys.”
The situation is obviously farcical, but because we take these bodily designations so seriously, the results are tragic. We are pleading with the citizens of this part of the world to understand the nonsectarian. transcendental philosophy Lord Kṛṣṅa speaks in the Bhagavad-gītā as the way to bring peace to the Middle East.