21 grams and the unborn

The film has a deliberately grainy, grey-green look – you know from the very first scenes you’re going to experience more loss than gloss – a look of disillusionment and struggle. It’s powered as much by the emotional experiences of the three main characters (and others, most notably Jack’s wife Marianne, played by Melissa Leo), the pain they struggle with, as by the beautifully orchestrated narrative. I found it thoroughly absorbing and profoundly realised. Other critics have written of a slightly heavy-handed mysticism – the 21 grams that just might contain the soul, Paul’s speech about the difficulties of two people meeting, the weirdness of the relation between two men who have shared the same heart – which I hardly noted at all, not having a mystical bone in my body, but I found the very real and material intertwining of these character’s lives through accident and, if you like, fate, completely convincing and painful. All three of these characters have fatal weaknesses – with Paul it’s largely physiological, with Christina and Jack it’s more emotional, but they win our sympathy and our respect because of their struggle against themselves, even when they make choices we wouldn’t make. It’s a finely nuanced film about heroism and ugliness – heroism and stupidity even. The heroism just manages to win out, and this is enough to inspire. The performances are stunning, with Del Toro a stand-out as Jack.

But I think it’s time to return to religion, which I’ve neglected for too long. The abortion issue has come to the fore again lately, with the usual suspects manoeuvring for position. It’s also a live topic in the US, with the old Rowe v Wade decision apparently in some danger of being overturned. The debate has long been polarised, and the issues are usually argued along religious lines. So is it the case that atheists, who don’t have much truck with the sacredness-of-life idea, should necessarily be ‘pro-choice’ (others call this position ‘pro-termination’)? Considering that in this morning’s Religion Report on Radio National we heard from a spokeswoman for pro-choice Catholics, we shouldn’t assume too much.

Probably, atheists tend to take a pragmatic view on these matters. Others might argue that they’re just being expedient, leaning towards the ‘rights’ of mothers or prospective mothers since they’re a noisier and more belligerent special interest group than unborn kids. Of course the defenders of unborn kids have become increasingly noisy too in recent years, but since they usually argue, or shout, from a sacredness-of-life perspective, atheists are not likely to feel sympathetic.

Rejecting sacredness-of-life claims, though, still leaves us with the question of the fairness or validity of destroying an entity which certainly has life and the potentiality of a rich and fulfilling life etc. Bringing in potentiality of course is always tricky, but probably unavoidable in the issue of abortion. If you could excise the concept of potential from the debate, it might be easier to argue that a human entity, a few weeks our from conception hasn’t had much of a life, in terms of its past experiences up to its present. It could hardly be said to have developed a consciousness, and possibly doesn’t even feel pain in the sense that we know about it. Yet it has all the chromosomal ingredients, and given the ‘normal’ level of nurturing, it could develop into a healthy and active human capable of as much constructiveness and destructiveness as we regularly practice.