Rockaby, Baby.

Doing a bit of websurfing, and ran into an article on Jewish approaches to abortion, from First Things magazine, published during the summer of 2005, in which Eric Cohen says the following:

Some Jewish thinkers, including Dorff, argue that the embryo ex vivo has limited moral standing because it cannot develop to term outside the womb. But surely all human beings deprived of the environment they need to flourish have “limited potential for life.” A bird trapped in a cage may never learn to fly, but it is no less a bird for the harm we caused by putting it there. A grown woman without food or water will surely die, but this lack of sustenance does not make the doomed person less than human. If anything, it challenges the humanity of those who left her there to die in the first place.

I think the logic impeccable, as you might expect, and suggest the following image: Earth as womb. Forget for now the implications of what we might be "delivered" into if we followed the whole logic of this image. Concentrate on what the earth means to us in terms of our comfort and nourishment, in short, in terms of our survivability. Sans Earth, yanked by whatever means from it, our womb, we flail for a moment and die, saved only by a metal case, an incubator, that is nonetheless ultimately dependent on that womb for its life-saving energies.

Without meaning to degrade the quality and importance of mothers and motherhood (for they are obviously of unfathomable and infinite importance), our mothers and our Earth are, on one level, simply containers for beings that are wholly independent of them in the matter of life. That is, mothers are sources of goods, but they are not the motive force behind the division and formation of our cells. We have not yet discovered - scientifically - what that motive force is, nor will we.