There Are No Beginnings There Are No Endings, Just a Cycle of Life in Many Forms

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"The Man Cave's Not-Too-Upsetting Guide to Down-There Parts" --The Rachel Maddow Show

Oh, how I love it when gay people set the record straight about how heterosexual sex works. Dan Savage, one of my favorite bigass homos, educates straight people too.

Rachel Maddow is my favorite bigass homo political science teacher. She can take complex political ideas and simplify them so even a lazy learner like me can understand them. She does the same thing here with her simply hilarious sex ed segment in response to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's obvious ignorance as to how a woman gets pregnant. He has, what, five kids? Proof that anyone can have a kid, even if they don't know how it happened. Might as well blame it on the stork.

I don't believe life starts at conception. And I certainly don't believe ignorant politicians should prevent people from using hormonal forms of birth control, The Pill, an IUD, that ring thing. You know, the form of birth control MOST young women in the United States use so they don't have an unwanted pregnancy which turns into an unwanted child which turns into an uncared for person. Or a person who the rest of us then give part of our income to in the form of taxes that pay for that oops of a person's housing, food, education and healthcare expenses.

Not that only poor people have unwanted pregnancies. Lots of people who can support themselves can also financially support their unplanned children. They just screw with their kids psychologically, but that's ok because it keeps the shrinks, the spiritual advisors, and the pharmaceutical industry in business.

The reason I don't believe life begins at conception is not because I'm a fan of abortions. Ending a pregnancy is a horrifying thing. The government has no right interfering in the private decision-making process of a person considering such a morally ambiguous choice. But that's not my complaint about any kind of "life begins at conception" bill.

I don't believe that life begins at conception because I believe life never ends. I think of life as energy, something which can never be created nor destroyed. It doesn't end. It transforms. People die. Animals die. Plants die. Cells die. But life doesn't end because of their death. It's just transformed into something else, a decomposed body, soil, energy for other living things.

No one KNOWS when life begins. Most of us have our BELIEFS about when life begins. Even scientists and spiritual guides are ignorant about it. They think, they believe, but they do not know. Scientists can figure out how an ovum and a sperm combine and multiply into a clump of cells that either get imbedded into a uterine wall or not. Spiritual guides tell us when they believe life begins. But no one, including me, can say for sure.

In my case, being subfertile, I most likely have conceived lots of clumps of cells but they have failed to attach to my womb. Doctors say my hormones are out of whack. Spiritual guides say I don't pray enough. But either way, although I feel sad that I can't seem to have another baby, I don't feel guilty that my uterus isn't a good hostess to Will's and my clump of cells. I don't feel like I'm preventing a life from beginning. I'm just preventing a life from transforming. It will go on without me.

That clump of cells is life, whether or not it implants in my uterus or gets flushed down the toilet at the end of the month. It's disappointing to think about the lost chance of spending time with that clump of celluar life that doesn't stick around, but I don't feel like a death occured. Life just changed form. A clump of cells got flushed down the toilet where it most likely got digested by some detritivores who then transformed it into something else, water, gas, dirt, fish food whatever. And we eat the fish and poop it out and it starts all over again.

My point is not to show you how if you think about it we eat our own children. I'm interested in, and comforted by, the cycle of life. A leaf falls from a tree. Detritivores digest it and transform it into soil which then the tree absorbs energy from to produce another leaf which will eventually fall to the ground on and on and on. It's really beautiful, life. In all forms.

Anyone who says they know when life begins is just not thinking things through. Mitt Romney, I'm looking at you.