The sesquicentennial of the Civil War is upon us, another opportunity for southerners to insist it wasn’t about slavery – merely about the right to live as they chose, a way of life that just happened to have depended on the enslavement of other human beings. Slavery was unquestionably the great moral issue of its day, and many would have us believe that today’s corresponding g.m.i. (or gimme, like a golf shot about which they feel there should be no argument) is abortion.

I fully understand the pro-lifers’ position. I just find it erroneous and based on questionable suppositions. They claim that a fertilized ovum is “a life” and as deserving of protection as any postnatal human. They submit as evidence ultrasound representations of fetal activity and would compel any woman contemplating abortion to view such evidence, as if it could melt her hardened heart.

For me, the issue isn’t life or not-yet-life. It isn’t degree of sentience, or determining the extent to which the response of fetal nerve pathways indicates pain or pleasure with which we should empathize. No, the 800-gram gorilla in the womb is what I don’t hear actually discussed that often: soul.

Pro-lifers believe that the union of sperm and egg doesn’t merely trigger a chain of mitotic events, it marks the magical instant in which the ovum is imbued with a soul. Even contraception that prevents implantation is murder, they maintain. But in order to be concerned over the fate of said soul, one must first accept that such an entity exists.

It’s hard to imagine that one doesn’t have a soul, we’re so inculcated with that belief. We think, we feel, we imagine ... surely this sets us apart from other animals, surely this is a sign that there’s something inside of us that drives our lives, that even survives the death of our physical bodies. Why is it so hard to accept the idea that all of our mental activities are biochemical? Because we want to believe. Because we’re afraid of being simply snuffed out, so go along with the fiction that a discorporate part of us will journey on to some other realm.

But I’m open-minded about it. Maybe there is in fact something about the brain’s electrical energy that actually survives death. Maybe through that energy we even have the option to reincarnate. Maybe we “grow” a soul by processing experience. But part of that experiential growth is self-awareness, and I have strong doubts (but cannot claim to actually know) that this commences in the womb. Cumulative memory, personality, instincts, fears – all of these things are stirred into the pot. Call it “soul-cooking” if you want, but it doesn’t start simmering until we start interacting with the world.

It’s all the legacy of Eden. So many people accept the premises of that fable, including the notion that a paternal deity breathed a soul into Adam. And as with so many other instances in life, they never stop to question premises. That fable was how a primitive people explained what they couldn’t understand, but the fact that that explanation survived unchallenged for millennia doesn’t make it so.

What I can never wrap my head around is the fact that pro-lifers aren’t vegetarians, that all life isn’t just as sacred. It must be because animals lack souls; after all, didn’t Genesis say they were put on earth for our benefit? And I’d bet a lot of pro-lifers have no qualms about capital punishment, since it’s right there in the Bible. (As, of course, is slavery.)

Then there’s the cuteness factor. We humans seem to melt in the face of babies (not just human babies: baby ducks, puppies, kittens of course... they may not have souls but they’re adorable), so potential babies strike a chord with many folks. They can’t help but insist that a fetus is more than merely the result of a replication machine doing its thing and instinctively want to protect it.

So when it comes to today’s great moral issue, I sometimes feel strange being on the receiving end of moralists’ pointing fingers – especially when they haul out the slavery analogy – but no more so, when you get right down to it, than if I were part of a conspiracy advocating the demythification of Santa Claus. It’s all well and good to decry cutting short a human life once it’s part of the world; but if pro-lifers didn’t believe that the fertilized egg harbored a soul, would they care? If their religious tradition dictated that the soul descended into the body as it emerged from the birth canal, would they instead urge abortions for unwanted children before they were so invested?

The pro-lifers see it as a gimme, and I don’t deny them their point of view. But it’s only a gimme when the whole idea of “soul” is as well.