© 2024 Sophie Malicot
© 2024 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
Sophie Malicot
January 2024
Some subjects are taboo in the fifth revelation. Abortion is one of them. Flirting with it in a study group is a guarantee of certain controversies. An elegance sometimes emerges: to escape dilemmas, some gentlemen conclude: “I am not a woman and cannot talk about it; let them speak”. So I pick it up - this raw speech and only commits me. And underlines in the first instance the first failure: abortion concerns men as much as women. Because despite the new customs of having babies in a unisex couple, it remains no less true that to MAKE this baby, a sperm and an egg are necessary. Therefore a man and a woman. And it will always be thus because humans will never know how to create life.
“Subsequent to even still greater progress and further discoveries, after Urantia has advanced immeasurably in comparison with present knowledge, though you should gain control of the energy revolutions of the electrical units of matter to the extent of modifying their physical manifestations—even after all such possible progress, forever will scientists be powerless to create one atom of matter or to originate one flash of energy or ever to add to matter that which we call life.” (UB 42:1.4)
“Life is both mechanistic and vitalistic—material and spiritual. Ever will Urantia physicists and chemists progress in their understanding of the protoplasmic forms of vegetable and animal life, but never will they be able to produce living organisms. Life is something different from all energy manifestations; even the material life of physical creatures is not inherent in matter.” (UB 36:6.1)
No doubt several readers - and readers - have silently sought in the book a consoling word, if their life journey had crossed this stage; or an answer to this burning question when the quest for truth torments ethics. No doubt also this questioning hides a search for a more open dialogue on the subject, less marked by prejudices and a priori - less disgrace - to make the reflection evolve with the divine data made available.
¶ A: THE ENVIRONMENT
Abortion remains torn between two poles, each as demanding as the other. On the one hand, feminist movements want the freedom to dispose of one’s body, implying pregnancies “if I want, when I want” (slogan of Family Planning) - with the contraceptive methods available. On the other hand, traditional movements cry murder in the face of abortion.
Between the two, one may identify with neither of these extremes, when the question calls for more wise nuances and brotherly compassion.
The Urantia Book addresses the subject in a single passage:
¶ 1. THE TABOO.
“Many races learned the technique of abortion, and this practice became very common after the establishment of the taboo on childbirth among the unmarried. It was long the custom for a maiden to kill her offspring, but among more civilized groups these illegitimate children became the wards of the girl’s mother. Many primitive clans were virtually exterminated by the practice of both abortion and infanticide. But regardless of the dictates of the mores, very few children were ever destroyed after having once been suckled—maternal affection is too strong.” (UB 68:6.9)
In this place, abortion is linked to taboo and taboo is a powerful regulating agent in the development of societies: it was a response to ancestral fears of invisible spirits, these ghost spirits bringing bad luck to the person or the entire tribe.
“Observance of a taboo was man’s effort to dodge ill luck, to keep from offending the spirit ghosts by the avoidance of something. The taboos were at first nonreligious, but they early acquired ghost or spirit sanction, and when thus reinforced, they became lawmakers and institution builders. The taboo is the source of ceremonial standards and the ancestor of primitive self-control. It was the earliest form of societal regulation and for a long time the only one; it is still a basic unit of the social regulative structure.” (UB 89:1.1)
¶ 2. RELATIONAL REGULATIONS.
The taboo was also an essential link in regulating behavior between men and women.
“In the earliest stages of tribal development the mores and restrictive taboos were very crude, but they did keep the sexes apart—this favored quiet, order, and industry—and the long evolution of marriage and the home had begun. The sex customs of dress, adornment, and religious practices had their origin in these early taboos which defined the range of sex liberties and thus eventually created concepts of vice, crime, and sin. But it was long the practice to suspend all sex regulations on high festival days, especially May Day.” (UB 82:2.4)
Suffice to say that the taboo carries the most primitive fears and instincts of humans. And if the content of taboos evolves with customs, the value of the taboo remains a constant used throughout civilizations. Abortion enters into a fluctuating framework; sometimes decreed as a good way to avoid bad luck, other times decried as attracting bad luck, it remains a constant of customs.
¶ 3. SELF-CONTROL.
But the taboo also brings progress towards better self-CONTROL, which develops with the progress of civilizations. This CONTROL - harmonizing the relationships between masculine and feminine - justifies the control of behaviors which should avoid untimely pregnancies.
“Observance of a taboo was man’s effort to dodge ill luck, to keep from offending the spirit ghosts by the avoidance of something. The taboos were at first nonreligious, but they early acquired ghost or spirit sanction, and when thus reinforced, they became lawmakers and institution builders. The taboo is the source of ceremonial standards and the ancestor of primitive self-control. It was the earliest form of societal regulation and for a long time the only one; it is still a basic unit of the social regulative structure.” (UB 89:1.1)
From the bestial stage to human equity, the 7 Adjutant Mental Spirits work with us to evolve mentalities in the harmonization of the masculine and feminine poles.
From then on, the virulences are better understood: abortion channels the long histories of transmission of beliefs where fears crystallize. It also channels the path of regulation of male-female relationships. This amounts to saying that it crystallizes two poles of the human being that are difficult to reconcile: on the one hand, the impulse for self-preservation asserting itself in the satisfaction of archaic impulses (copulation); on the other hand, the aspiration for self-perpetuation asserting itself in childbirth, implying self-CONTROL (the family).
¶ 4. EDUCATION.
The following paragraph raises another aspect relating to abortion:
“Even in the twentieth century there persist remnants of these primitive population controls. There is a tribe in Australia whose mothers refuse to rear more than two or three children. Not long since, one cannibalistic tribe ate every fifth child born. In Madagascar some tribes still destroy all children born on certain unlucky days, resulting in the death of about twenty-five per cent of all babies.” (UB 68:6.10)
This paragraph has as its general theme “The evolution of culture”. It is no longer a question of taboo, nor of fears and beliefs, but of educational capacities. Abortion is one of the means used to guarantee a certain education, by removing the surplus. Note the unique mention of mothers because it is still a “primitive practice” where any female mammal only keeps the number of young that she can breastfeed. during this passage begins the shift from the quantitative aspect of offspring to ensure life to the qualitative aspect of education enhancing life.
¶ 5. OVERPOPULATION AND SELECTION.
The formulation “primitive practice of birth control” induces two corollary problems added to birth control and stipulated elsewhere: on the one hand the question of overpopulation, on the other hand a theme which is also very sensitive which we will call here the human level.
“From a world standpoint, overpopulation has never been a serious problem in the past, but if war is lessened and science increasingly controls human diseases, it may become a serious problem in the near future. At such a time the great test of the wisdom of world leadership will present itself. Will Urantia rulers have the insight and courage to foster the multiplication of the average or stabilized human being instead of the extremes of the supernormal and the enormously increasing groups of the subnormal? The normal man should be fostered; he is the backbone of civilization and the source of the mutant geniuses of the race. The subnormal man should be kept under society’s control; no more should be produced than are required to administer the lower levels of industry, those tasks requiring intelligence above the animal level but making such low-grade demands as to prove veritable slavery and bondage for the higher types of mankind.” (UB 68:6.11)
Natural selection prevails for the development of civilizations: the law of the strongest has dominated and still dominates the world. However, the technological, moral, and intellectual advances of civilizations shift the notion of “strongest”. With industry, physical strength takes second place to mental strength - intelligence. Selection continues, but according to other criteria that amend other behaviors in the face of future children: no longer becoming a force of nature but a mental force: a high-performance brain. For illustration: Stephen Hawking. The task is as sensitive as it is heavy, especially our isolation in meeting this challenge:
“But while the pure-line children of a planetary Garden of Eden can bestow themselves upon the superior members of the evolutionary races and thereby upstep the biologic level of mankind, it would not prove beneficial for the higher strains of Urantia mortals to mate with the lower races; such an unwise procedure would jeopardize all civilization on your world. Having failed to achieve race harmonization by the Adamic technique, you must now work out your planetary problem of race improvement by other and largely human methods of adaptation and control.” (UB 51:5.7)
Presented differently, this “racial improvement” is already underway. Let us mention the advancement of medicine. Medical progress is constantly working to eradicate various diseases and pathologies, in order to improve human performance. Who will complain about this? Concerning pregnancies, prenatal examinations detect certain pathologies and then suggest terminations of pregnancy. What criterion will condemn the parents, especially if this same pathology is already present in the siblings?
¶ B: THE FETUS
Thus, varying beliefs, taboos, self-CONTROL, education, medical progress toss abortion between failure and amendment, between transgression and remission. These parameters concern the environment of the abortion but do not concern the fetus. What is its status? Can it simply be evacuated or is it a full entity, with rights? What are its attributes?
¶ 6. THE FETUUS: A PERSON?
The question is whether the fortus is a person. If so, then he must meet the
“These qualities of universal reality are manifest in Urantian human experience on the following levels:” (UB 0:5.6)
Human beings possess identity only in the material sense. Such qualities of the self are expressed by the material mind as it functions in the energy system of the intellect. When it is said that man has identity, it is recognized that he is in possession of a mind circuit which has been placed in subordination to the acts and choosing of the will of the human personality. But this is a material and purely temporary manifestation, just as the human embryo is a transient parasitic stage of human life. Human beings, from a cosmic perspective, are born, live, and die in a relative instant of time; they are not enduring. But mortal personality, through its own choosing, possesses the power of transferring its seat of identity from the passing material-intellect system to the higher morontia-soul system which, in association with the Thought Adjuster, is created as a new vehicle for personality manifestation. (UB 112:5.4)
Medically, any foreign body is considered a parasite by the carrier body, which it rejects. The only exception to this rejection: the embryo. Let’s expand to the physical entity:
“Children who die when too young to have Thought Adjusters are repersonalized on the finaliter world of the local systems concomitant with the arrival of either parent on the mansion worlds. A child acquires physical entity at mortal birth, but in the matter of survival all Adjusterless children are reckoned as still attached to their parents.” (UB 49:6.12)
“Entity” in the etymological sense means “to be”. Consequently, as long as the child is not born, it “is” not. However, the status of person implies being. At the level of the law, the fetus is not a civic person and does not have its own rights.
Legal personality is acquired at birth, provided that the child is born alive and viable. As a result, a stillborn child is not a person; it is considered as never having existed. From this perspective, an abortion is not murder.
The mind: “thinking, perceiving and feeling mechanism”, prepared before the conception of the person.
“The types and patterns of mind are determined by the precreature factors of being. After these have been associated to constitute a creature (personal or otherwise), mind is the endowment of the Third Source and Center, the universal source of mind ministry to all beings below the level of Paradise Creators.” (UB 21:2.7)
In this conception, the fetus already carries a unique prototype of mind, carefully prepared by divine beings. An abortion destroys this unique prototype, which is made void by the termination of pregnancy.
The spirit: The Thought Adjuster arriving around the child’s 6th birthday, it is not concerned at the fetal level.
The soul: Many schools of thought convey that the soul, pre-existing the arrival of the child, chooses its parents to incarnate. Let us cite the New Age, but more broadly the beliefs in reincarnation. The birth of the soul is around 6 years old, with the arrival of the Thought Adjuster. An abortion does not concern the soul.
¶ 7. PERSONALITY.
We do not know precisely when it arrives and there are lively discussions on this subject. Is it in place from the conception of the fetus? At birth? Or later? Personality is the unifying element of the person. It draws its origin from the split of the original absolute Deity, I AM, into the dual Father-Son Deity. It is therefore established as a relationship. Consequently, two aspects are to be appreciated:
If we consider that the personality is present from conception, it is certain that it is not functioning effectively because it cannot exercise its role of unifier in fullness before the 4 elements to be unified are present (body + mind + soul + spirit). However, two are missing.
“When Thought Adjusters indwell the human mind, they bring with them the model careers, the ideal lives, as determined and preordained by themselves and the Personalized Adjusters of Divinington, and confirmed as valid by the Personalized Adjuster of Urantia. They thus begin to work with a definite and predetermined plan for the intellectual and spiritual development of their human subject.” UB 110:2.1
This implies that, in order to bring these model careers and ideal lives into line with the person, the Thought Adjusters go to work beforehand. Does this work begin when the fetus is in progress? Or at the birth of the child? We see the meticulousness of this work prior to incarnation in the preparation of the conditions for Michael’s 7th bestowal on our planet, even if it does not concern his personality. In this case, an abortion may not destroy the personality but annihilates its preordained strategy.
¶ C: SOME REFERENCE POINTS
Do these highlighted points help us in lifting the tides on abortion?
¶ 8. GUILT.
The link with current customs and taboos probably alone justifies a large part of the guilt experienced by women and men/families/tribes affected by abortion.
The story of Adam and Eve in the biblical Genesis only heavily accentuated this image of the sinful woman losing humanity through her deviant behavior. Being the bearer of an act having destructive value of the civilization in which we live had and still has the value of religious and social anathema. The following nuance is however important:
“The sense or feeling of guilt is the consciousness of the violation of the mores; it is not necessarily sin. There is no real sin in the absence of conscious disloyalty to Deity.” (UB 89:10.3)
And hope arises when:
“The possibility of the recognition of the sense of guilt is a badge of transcendent distinction for mankind. It does not mark man as mean but rather sets him apart as a creature of potential greatness and ever-ascending glory. Such a sense of unworthiness is the initial stimulus that should lead quickly and surely to those faith conquests which translate the mortal mind to the superb levels of moral nobility, cosmic insight, and spiritual living; thus are all the meanings of human existence changed from the temporal to the eternal, and all values are elevated from the human to the divine.” (UB 89:10.4)
¶ 9. LOYALTY.
Women carry the symbol of fidelity more than men. Abortion reduces them to people of easy virtue, of loose morals undermining the fundamental values structuring society, while the equivalent is not done with regard to male infidelity.
“Women have always been subject to more restrictive taboos than men. The early mores granted the same degree of sex liberty to unmarried women as to men, but it has always been required of wives that they be faithful to their husbands. Primitive marriage did not much curtail man’s sex liberties, but it did render further sex license taboo to the wife. Married women have always borne some mark which set them apart as a class by themselves, such as hairdress, clothing, veil, seclusion, ornamentation, and rings.” (UB 82:2.5)
¶ 10. ABORTIONS AND DIVINE PLANS.
Finally, it is very interesting to note the 9 other uses of the word “abortion” in the Urantia Book, only in relation to the divine beings Adam, Eve and Caligastia. An abortion is a plan preconceived by the divinity whose advent could not be carried out to its conclusion as planned. In other words: a potential beginning its actualization whose actualization did not succeed according to the initial divine plans.
“From a creature’s viewpoint, actuality is substance, potentiality is capacity. Actuality exists centermost and expands therefrom into peripheral infinity; potentiality comes inward from the infinity periphery and converges at the center of all things. Originality is that which first causes and then balances the dual motions of the cycle of reality metamorphosis from potentials to actuals and the potentializing of existing actuals.” (UB 115:3.12)
Translated to the human level, the difficulties of abortion can then be understood as follows: a fetus is a peripheral potential for the accomplishment of the Supreme from which the Supreme - in its density at the center - will not benefit because this potential is not actualized. This is corroborated by the pre-established but unrealized mind and personality. Perhaps we have a presentiment of this invalidity of the Supreme, inducing our guilt?
If each fetus is a budding potential, then each embryo of the living is the same. Thus billions of billions of plants, animals and humans are these potentials that have not come to pass. Because nature is more than generous and the successful fertilization of a plant, an animal or a human represents only an infinitesimal part of the reproductive potential of the living. God gives this colossal potential for reproduction knowing that almost all of this gift will be aborted.
And by sliding the Deity provides the Supreme with a colossal potential for actualization, the majority of which will not be actualized. This means that God’s plan provides for this surplus, since the laws of matter make these abundant losses inevitable.
¶ D: THE FUTURE?
Faced with so many possibilities of fertilization, when “primitive practices” have evolved and pregnancies are better controlled, does this mean that human fertilizations will all be desired and successful, while nature will always be as generous and itself subject to this monstrous selection? Even in this case, there will always be billions of eggs and sperm destined solely for the humus of the earth.
This integration of the notion of loss into the divine plan is not related to the mortal plane. The same selective dynamic affects the soul and the personality:
“This group, while enjoying provisional citizenship on Jerusem, were as yet unfused with their Thought Adjusters; and when they volunteered and were accepted for planetary service in liaison with the descending orders of sonship, their Adjusters were detached. But these Jerusemites were superhuman beings—they possessed souls of ascendant growth. During the mortal life in the flesh the soul is of embryonic estate; it is born (resurrected) in the morontia life and experiences growth through the successive morontia worlds. And the souls of the Caligastia one hundred had thus expanded through the progressive experiences of the seven mansion worlds to citizenship status on Jerusem.” (UB 66:4.9)
“It is this same spirit personality, in primitive and embryonic form, the Adjuster possession of which survives the natural death in the flesh. This composite entity of spirit origin in association with human experience is enabled, by means of the living way provided by the divine Sons, to survive (in Adjuster custody) the dissolution of the material self of mind and matter when such a transient partnership of the material and the spiritual is divorced by the cessation of vital motion.” (UB 101:3.3)
If our soul and our personality are embryos, will they reach their full radiance?