Theos-Talk Archives (September 1995 Message tl00910)

On Sun, 24 Sep 1995, Brenda S. Tucker wrote:

> >Rich quotes HPB:
> > The crime committed lies precisely in the willful and sinful destruction
> >>of life, and interference with the operations of nature, hence--with
> >>KARMA
> >
> >> But foeticide is a
> >>crime against nature.
> >
> >May I ask a common sense question here? Do we interfere with the operations
> >of nature? Under what circumstances? When is it correct to do so?
>
> Here's one additional comment regarding whether nature cooperates with the
> process of abortion. Many, many miscarriages take place at all stages of
> fetal development. There are souls subjected to this process "naturally."
> How much more difficult would it be to include "assisted" miscarriages in
> the karmic lot? Maybe nature could slow down on her "natural" abortions and
> just incorporate the number of "assisted" ones. For instance, one neighbor
> had seven miscarriages before her child was born. One neighbor had five. If
> you ask around, there are lots and lots. You guys just don't always know
> about these.
>
> Brenda

Brenda:

Couldn't agree with you more. I've always thought the "crimes
against nature" argument was somewhat weak - as it seems to believe that
human life is somehow more important than any other sort of life ... that
is, apparently the enormous rise in medical abilities and other
technological advances that now permit *far* more children to both come
to term and survive childhood, and that has increased life expectancy
from an average (in the US) of around 49 years to around 75 in this
century alone is not "going against nature", but foeticide is ... i.e.,
the assumption is that anything that preserves and prolongs the life of
the individual human is somehow working "with" nature.

Problem is that even with the abortions in the modern world, the
human population is increasing at an astonishing rate, and the effects on
the biosphere are frightening - the outright extinction of several
species a *day* ... is this "natural"?

Many species have been observed, upon reaching the limits of the
carrying capacity of a particular ecosystem, to use various different
means of limiting their reproduction - in fact I read somewhere last year
that sperm counts among the earth's males are beginning to show a
decrease ... this may be one of a number of biological feedback
mechanisms that are triggered by overpopulation, and the widespread
relaxation of the foeticide taboo (which some biologists believe to be
genetically based) may well be another.

"Nature", in almost every species plant or animal, generally sows
a number of seeds enormous in proportion to the actual number of them
that successfully turn into organisms. Many deaths, at all stages of
development from gestation to adolescence, is not a *bad* thing in the
view of "nature", and seems to be built into natural systems themselves.
We have, as a species, this century, *temporarily* been successful in
going *against* this "natural" process (and the numbers are very hard to
get a subjective grasp of - it took from the beginning of recorded
history until around 1850 to for our species to hit its first billion,
and in less that 150 years we have grown to over 5.5 billion). I do not
believe that abstract or ideological beliefs formulated 100, 200, 300
years ago are suitable grounds to address this problem - we cannot simply
ignore the fact that largely because of our "unnatural" science, we have
overcome so many different "laws" of nature that our species is now
preventing numerous other "group-souls" from even having a doorway
through which to experience physical plane incarnation (which is what a
species extinction is).

 -JRC