Abortion and euthanasia are two of the most scorched-over debate battlefields in the West. Positions for and against tend to stalemate because questions about life and death are often seen as absolute. When does life begin? When does it end? Answers to these can help determine whether one is a prolifer, and to what degree. But by the same token, the either-or nature of life issues as they are often framed can lead to polarized views. Debate gets stuck in repeat mode; agreement remains elusive.

But what if there were another way to think about life (and death)? Two Asian traditions may help prolifers in the West frame life questions in such a way that the moral power of human life overwhelms the temptation to treat life and non-life as equals on an abstract debate field. In this two-part blog posting (please stay tuned for part two next month), I examine ways in which Asian perspectives may win over skeptics and open new avenues for reaching agreement on life issues.

First, on the “When does life begin?” side of the spectrum, a recent book about an ancient Indian religion, Jainism, has got me thinking about the possibility of transcending the current debate parameters by removing the possibility of “non-life” from the conversation. Instead of wrangling over when life begins, maybe Jainism can help us think more about how to cherish the human life that already exists all around us.

Insistent Life: Principles for Bioethics in the Jain Tradition, is a scholarly monograph by University of California-Irvine scholar of philosophy and religion Brianne Donaldson and University of California-Riverside religious studies scholar Ana Bajželj. The book is divided into two parts. In the first, Donaldson and Bajželj lay out “foundational principles” of Jainism—which has a lot to say about life issues because it is arguably the world religion most intimately concerned with bioethics. Jains see human beings and all other living things as enmeshed in a karmic cycle. The taking of any life, including microbial life, engenders more karma, further entrapping the offending being in the wheeling round of birth, death, and rebirth. Nonviolence (ahimsa) is therefore Jainism’s overarching prescription for limiting karma and achieving liberation from the cycle of suffering, death, and further suffering.

Life is central to Jainism in another way, too. For Jains, as the authors explain, “everything that exists [is] expressed through substances (dravya) and their qualifiers. [Jains] posit a multiplicity of eternal substances, five kinds of which are considered nonliving and one kind of which is living. The living kind of substance is called jīva or ātman, often translated as the self, living substance, living entity, or soul” (16). The eternal substance of jīva, alive and life-giving, seems, to me, to have the power to short-circuit debates about when life begins. “Perhaps,” one might retort when debating a pro-choicer, “life doesn’t begin at all, but simply continues.” According to Donaldson and Bajželj, some Jain commentators have compared “the beginningless inherent nature (svabhāva) of the self (ātman)” to gold, the “inherent nature [of which] persists through its various modifications into a bracelet, a ring, or some other object” (18). Instead of dwelling on when a human becomes a human, then, a Jainist view can counter that life is always life, without exception.

Indeed, where I find Jain bioethics particularly laden with possibilities for the pro-life movement in the West is the understanding of “living beings in the womb (garbha)” as just that, living beings (33). While there are theological differences in how living beings are born (with deities, for example, by descent instead of through normal biological processes), Jainism emphasizes that the soul is the active principle in the formation of a body in the womb (34). “Humans belong to the viviparous with placenta class [of five-sensed beings],” Donaldson and Bajželj write, and their “new embryonic form is developed in the womb as a combination of nonliving matter from their parents (semen and blood) and their own jīva” (35). It isn’t biology that determines life, then, but life that determines biology.

Also, whether a living being is human or not, Jains recognize that all “living beings experience pain,” which prompts Jains to refrain from harming, and of course killing, any other living thing. In one influential Jain sutra, “doctors who provide harm-causing treatment are […] denounced,” and physicians are enjoined to “refrain from [therapeutic measures that torment other living beings],” being reminded that “one should not harm anything [even for the sake of treatment]” (85-87). This strikes me as another powerful Jain argument in favor of the pro-life position. A living being in the womb has life by virtue of existing and is to be respected as a fellow creature capable of feeling pain. Furthermore no one with a vocation to heal should do harm to any life.

These are the foundational principles, but what does Jainism look like in the real world? In the second half of Insistent Life, Donaldson and Bajželj turn to “principles of application” for Jain theology and bioethics. There are fascinating discussions here, based in part on a survey of Jain medical practitioners in various countries, about abortion, organ donation, IVF, stem-cell research, and other life issues. Despite the solid nonviolence of their religion, Jain doctors are not perfectly pro-life, alas. The Jain sutras are either silent or unclear, Donaldson and Bajželj write, on “abortion, population control, and contraception,” and Jain healers find that the complexity of real-world situations often challenges deeply held beliefs (117).

Jain physicians and other medical practitioners also often make distinctions—something very familiar to those in the West as well—between religious ideals and social contexts, for example by assenting to abortion even though personally opposed to it (121). Also, the two authors themselves, somewhat jarringly given the sensitivity with which they present Jainist commitments, repeat the unscientific canard that “there is no scientific consensus” as to when human life begins (119). Jain believers and scholars, then, can be just as out to sea as anyone about the sanctity of human life. So, Jainism is no panacea for the pro-life movement by any means.

But pace the unscientific hiccup just mentioned, the overarching theme of Insistent Life is that the Jain “concept of compassion indicates a comprehension of shared vulnerability and suffering, and not merely a sense of impassioned sympathy” (59). Donaldson and Bajželj conclude that “a Jain ethics of abortion exceeds any single issue of life’s beginning, fetal personhood, or stage of pregnancy, and complicates a flat application of the vow of nonviolence [which characterizes Jainism]” (125). This multifaceted approach, which in Jainism is called “non-one-sidedness (anekānta-vāda),” seems to me to be something that prolifers in the West can use when debating life issues with those hostile to pro-life views. That is, there are many ways to think about life questions, and there is, at the same time, no line between one life and another, but rather life giving life to life in perpetuity. All living beings are interdependent, especially the unborn child, dependent on—physically connected to—his or her mother for survival.

To be sure, there is a profound karmic apparatus upholding the Jain views of life in the body. Whether it is possible to elide the religious side of Jainism while embracing Jains’ regard for the continuity of the life force is a separate question. Perhaps Western prolifers will find the metaphysical aspects of Jainism too high a hurdle. I prefer, however, to hazard the theological gauntlet in the hope of overcoming stalled debates on when life begins. “Jain texts insist that the jīva starts a new embodied existence almost immediately after the death of its previous form,” Donaldson and Bajželj explain (113). This, to my mind, can be readily, if roughly, brought down from the metaphysical register to emphasize the continuing nature of life from person to person, if not from one reincarnation to another.

It also jives with something I have long thought, and other prolifers may also have intuited: Life does not, technically, begin at conception. Life began at creation, with God. It has not stopped since. Young ones in wombs are therefore not individuals who may be dispensed of by other individuals; rather they are clothed in a power—eternal life—that is beyond human comprehension. Frame it as you like—religiously or just scientifically—but emphasizing that life is ongoing can be a way to change minds about abortion. A healthy respect for life, however engendered—and maybe Jainism can be of use here—seems to me to be a very good way to overcome deadlocked arguments about when life begins and shift the debate to how to protect life as it already exists.

Insistent Life is available as a free download. Although the subject matter is technical, the prose is pleasant, and the reading is not as heavy as the many endnotes and foreign words might indicate. Those who are interested in bioethics or religion are encouraged to work through this very nicely done volume and decide for themselves whether Jainism is as potentially helpful an avenue for debating life issues as I imagine it to be. I especially hope Jains reading this will share their insights, whether for or against my thesis.

In the next blog posting, I turn to the subject of death to consider how another Asian viewpoint might help change the conversation in the West about issues of human life.