This is not a political screed about abortion. I have placed it in my ‘Religion’ category.
My thinking was stimulated when a friend told me that I would someday see my deceased daughter in the afterlife. My first question was: “She was 7 when she died. Will she still be a cute 7-year-old whenever I meet her?” A secondary question was, “If I’m a senile old man when I die, will I still be that decrepit creature when I meet her in the afterlife?”
From there, my thoughts turned to my unborn son, due next month. If he was aborted or otherwise died, would his soul go to the afterlife? Would he still be a fetus in the afterlife? Would he remain inside his mother, or would he somehow exist independently?
Let’s assume that a fetus has a soul. Perhaps the first question to raise would be, “Where did that soul come from?” Did it exist before conception? Did that soul reside in a sperm cell, or within the mother’s egg. No, I don’t think so. Both sperm and eggs didn’t even exist at some point before conception, and were created out of bodily chemicals. That would imply that all billions of sperm cells and eggs have souls, but they die before conception. But then, would those souls have an afterlife? No, this is ridiculous.
Maybe those souls were waiting out there in soul-land for a body to enter, and then entered the fetus at conception. There are 8 billion souls in living human beings in the world. Have they all been waiting out there since time immemorial? There were only a billion people only a few centuries ago. Where were those other 7 billion back then? No, I think the idea of billions of souls waiting from the beginning of time is not an idea that I can take seriously.
So I conclude that a new soul is created at conception or afterwards, and may have some kind of ‘soul-DNA’ from both parents.
But then, what about identical twins? They start out as one egg-sperm combination, but then, not simultaneously, the egg sometimes splits and may end up in two placenta, I.e. as twins. Does it have one soul upon conception, which then divides into two twin souls afterwards? That would mean that a separate soul is created after conception. That seems unlikely to me.
Suppose next that a fetus dies before birth. Does it develop so as to be somehow ‘born’ as a person in the afterlife? That doesn’t make much sense if the mother is still alive and not in the afterlife. And yet, I can’t imagine that it remains a fetus forever and ever.
Cambodian Buddhism has an interesting take on this. Despite the central doctrine of reincarnation, the Buddha refused to answer a question on the existence of the soul. Apparently, the ‘self’ that is reincarnated is not the same concept as the soul.
Further, in Cambodia there is a concept of pralung, something like life-force. All living creatures, including plants, have this. The human pralung is not a unique force; indeed, each person has 19 different pralung, which can enter or leave the body. The fetus has pralung, but it is not clear where they come from.
Islam has an interesting answer. The fetus at birth has no soul, but a soul is somehow ‘breathed’ into the fetus at the age of about 120 days after conception. Not a bad idea, but I have trouble with the idea that one second a fetus has no soul, and the next moment it does. Then we get back to the question of where that soul comes from. Clearly not the mother and father, but rather from the outside somewhere. Moreover, the Islamic version avoids the question of a billion-year-old soul just waiting to enter a new body; rather, Islam has God creating a new soul for each person, after conception.
That brings me back to the question of age. If a small baby dies, does its soul grow older: does it mature to adulthood in the afterlife, or is it forever fixed as a baby. On the other hand, if an old person dies, does their soul grow even older and more decrepit, perhaps to 200 or 300 years old, like the portrait of Dorian Gray? Or do they somehow revert to some golden age of, say, 30, forever.
Related questions: will Michael Jordan play basketball in heaven, or will he be too old? Does Liberace have his piano in heaven? If I am attached to a pet dog, will I see my dog in heaven? Do dogs have souls?
All these imponderables appear ridiculous to me. I have to conclude that, if indeed the soul somehow exists, there must be some kind of non-physical soul-stuff in heaven, and that when we die, our non-physical soul merges with the great soul-in-the-sky. In short, I can’t see myself recognizing my erstwhile 7-year-old daughter, at least not from her appearance. I can’t even see myself recognizing myself, for that matter. However, if we had formed a strong spiritual bond during her life, that spiritual bond might somehow exist beyond the grave, within the great, timeless Ur-Seele.