Heavy Issues

I decided that some of my posts might be thought of as trivial, so today I’m writing about life and death. Really.

It’s the debate in Washington over forced birth control coverage that got my brain going down all kinds of rabbit holes. For starters: If you accept the notion that life begins at conception, shouldn’t we be celebrating conception days instead of birthdays? Perhaps some of you already celebrate both c’days and b’days.

How about contraception? It’s tough to be opposed to abortion and contraception at the same time, because if you oppose contraception, well, aren’t you likely to bump up the number of abortions under the current state of the law? Of course, there is abstinence, but you can see how well that’s worked out for us.

Death is a tough one, too. We can’t seem to agree on when a person is 100 percent dead, especially when there are now so many artificial means of keeping us going at the “end of life.” Death is as much a legal term as it is a medical one. In the past, it was actually defined differently from state to state – perhaps still is. Are you dead when the machine says your brain is no longer sending out signals? What happens if you “die,” see the white light and your departed friends, but then something happens and you’re sent back down here? Does that mean your last will and testament doesn’t take effect after all? Do the relatives waiting to cash in have to pour the champagne back in the bottle?

You can see why I have a splitting headache. It will be a relief to return to more trivial matters.