The Time: 2049
The Place: The
Moon
The Situation: Aborting a baby
After mistakenly implying that one of Clara’s
schoolchildren isn’t special, Clara instructs The Doctor to play nice and take
it back. So rather than go the way of an apology he decides to let young Courtney
Wood be the first woman on the moon, so as to really let her be someone important. The
fact that the first woman only gets there in 2049 is both disturbing and
unfortunately likely to be accurate. We should launch more lunar missions. Who
do we talk to about that that sort of thing?
Anyway, they go to the moon and the gravity
is f***ed and it has f***ed the tides up on Earth so the Earthlings decide to
blow it up. The moon that is, not gravity, which would be remarkably more
difficult.
“One small thing for a thing. One enormous thing for a
thingy thing.”
~
Courtney Wood, the first woman on the moon.
In a brief history lesson, we learn that after
the dramatic failure of the first mining venture to the moon, Earth lost its
taste for space exploration. When the moon facility went dark, they turned
their sights inward and stopped their space program. The team they send to the
moon in this episode is composed of retired astronauts in an antique shuttle.
Doing some impressive yo-yo science, The
Doctor determines that the alien ‘monsters’ who attacked the moon-miners are
macro-organic bacterial spiders living in the shell of a giant space egg, which
has actually been orbiting Earth as its moon for millions of years: and the
recent gravity f*** up was due to it being in the process of hatching. Physics
fans will probably be writing to the BBC about this one for years.
After being chased around a bit with
skeletons and spiders and shadows and things the whole situation is thoroughly
explored, laying ground for the scarier second half of the episode: the
abortion debate.
“Please can I go home now? I’m really, really sorry,
but I’d like to go home.”
~Courtney
Wood, a Disruptive Influence
The Doctor and Clara talk about the fate of
the moon, and of Earth. Clara believes that it is possible to predetermine that
the moon is saved because she has seen it exists in the future, but The Doctor
explains that it may not be so; the moon she saw could be a hologram, or a
replica. Even with time travel, he claims, events are open to interpretation.
There is no direct course to follow, and choices must be made without any
awareness of their outcome. The idea shocks Clara. As the Doctor seems so often
to be infinitely knowledgeable and experienced, the idea of choice and risk are
practical non-entities. Now facing them clearly, she becomes a little more like
him by having to stick by a doctrine and abide its consequences, with no
guidance from her friend.
“Clara, there are some moments in time that I simply
can’t see. Little eye blinks. They don’t look the same as other things. They’re
not clear, they’re fuzzy, they’re grey. Little moments in which big things are
decided – and this is one of them.”
~ A
Needy Egotistical Gameplayer
They are left with the question of whether
or not to undertake an abortion of the moon’s birth. The last surviving astronaut
of 2049, Captain Lundvik, believes that it would be justified because the
birth has been causing disasters on Earth. Clara rebuts that you can’t really
blame a baby for kicking. As a living being, even though still in its foetal
stage, doesn’t it have a right to life? Even if that life will destroy the
lives of others?
The Doctor abstains from making the actual
decision, as many who have strong opinions on other people’s abortions would
never have the decency to do.
Putting aside the fact that the moon baby
may be the last of its kind, and that Earth won’t have to pay its school fees
or any of that other superficial information, it essentially does come down to
a debate about abortion: It is a very good one, too, because many liberals enter
into it as pro-choice advocates (though in certain cases ‘pro-death’ is more
accurate), and do not recognize the infinite, potential beauty and possibility
of a baby as a unique life – only seeing it as a life ‘in general’. Knowing the
theme of Doctor Who, they will likely unconsciously side with the choice of
letting the unique, alien lifeform live at the expense of human comfort, as The
Doctor has done on past occasions in a presiding spirit of xenophilia. Now
those liberals find themselves working against their own established arguments:
this foetus is a unique living being, and intervention to its birth is
undoubtedly killing.
To an extent this can be considered true of
all foetuses. The truth is that we
are entirely unaware of what they will grow to be. A foetus can grow to be the
next Einstein – or the next Hitler. But what is certain is that there will
never be that baby born at that time under those circumstances. Abortion kills a possibility, and it is always
a unique possibility. But – and it’s an important ‘but’ – a baby also kills the
possibilities of life without it, just by existing. A baby’s very first act in being
conceived is to commit an extradimensional homicide.
Killing doesn’t necessarily entail murder. The task of the moon-landers is
to determine whether the foetus is innocent
if by attaining life it threatens the lives of every human on Earth – life which
is just as unique and irreplaceable as itself. This is the question of whether
you perhaps can blame a baby for
kicking, pronounce it guilty of attempted murder, and kill it in self-defence.
Being ‘pro-choice’ in its strictest sense is what The Doctor
chooses to do in this episode: he steps outside and lets the mothers have the
argument. A strict pro-choice stance is one towards non-influence, to exert no
pressure over the one making the decision by removing any relief, contempt, picketers
or expectation from the path of the one making the choice. To exert any influence,
it is believed, is to sway a person’s choice by tying strings of obligation to
them.
However, there is no option of non-influence when an abortion affects everyone around
it. This is demonstrated when the moon-landers contact Earth and ask every
human being to weigh in on the decision. It’s insanity to imagine that with a colossal
alien about to burst into existence above their home, any human could expect
that their life won’t be changed by the decision. That they won’t be forced to
take action once the decision is
made. They aren’t the ones making the
decision, but they are personally
invested in the outcome.
If you as the viewer take a side in this
argument, as it is assumed you will (we all get personally invested in good
television), you become either ‘pro-life’ or ‘pro-death’ in the matter of how
the alien abortion affects society as a whole, which in a sense any abortion
really does. You make your choice of
which one best suits your own interests, and how you will respond to each. If
you believe in individuality, you acknowledge that that is the choice that belongs to you, just as the choice of
whether or not to abort belongs to the mother or host of the foetus. They are
different choices. But both are worth protecting.
*
Ultimately and objectively, there is no clear
right answer to this kind of abortion. You will be killing something beautiful
and unique in either case, and so you cannot make the decision on whether or
not you are killing something beautiful and unique. You could make the decision
on race, saying ‘us or them’, but if you’ve been paying any attention to Doctor
Who up until now you know there is no ‘us’ and no ‘them’, only ‘life’. You
could make the decision based on utilitarian numerical values, saying that ‘the
needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few’, but who is to say that that
few, that one, will not have the great and brilliant life that has more gravity
than the millions around it? Whether that one is the mother or the child?
A spectrum of these outlooks is presented
by three types of people who commonly find themselves in the position of
undertaking an abortion:
Courtney
Woods is a high school student, at a very young age
to adequately deal with having a baby. Proceeding with a pregnancy would mean
sacrificing her future, losing her own childhood in the process. She has been
put in the place of performing her first serious decision, and is
understandably terrified. It’s entirely natural in this position to see
abortion as a safe choice, putting everything back the way it was. As it is,
Courtney is mostly paralyzed by the gravity of the situation. Which is higher
than normal.
Captain
Lundvik is at the opposite side of the spectrum,
likely on her last eggs and entirely wearied by the thought of starting the
next phase of her life. It would be easy to simply go on living the same life
she always had, actively discouraging change and promoting a kind of stagnation
reserved for a person who sees the important part of their life as over,
looking back on it from golden years in which she is ready to die. Lundvik in
this episode embodies the zeitgeist of Earth at 2049, closed off to the terror
of space and unwilling to start a long and painful adventure.
Clara
Oswald is somewhere in the middle, debatably in the
best position to have a baby, even if it is as the result of an unplanned
pregnancy right at the start of a new relationship. To her, the choice is
mainly about whether her body is prepared, whether the environment the baby is
entering is prepared, and whether the baby itself is healthy or a malicious
monster. She correctly identifies that what she needs to make the right choice,
to turn an unplanned pregnancy into a prepared birth or an informed abortion is
information. What she needs is a doctor
– and The Doctor is out.
We are presented with the responses of
these three archetypes, and given something of a spirit of the moment. Courtney
hesitates, wanting someone else to make the decision. Lundvik says no. The
Earth, once polled, returns a unanimous ‘no’. Only Clara considers it as
anything approaching an option. If I were to guess, I’d say this is an
indication that it’s never the perfect time to have a baby – look for reasons
not to, and you’ll find them. Change is scary. It’s something of a novelty to
our 21st century that abortions are as widely available and as safe
as they’ve ever been, that when we are scared we actually have the option of
backing out. Our ancestors had little option of backing out, were forced to be
courageous. No-one is forcing the 21st century to be courageous. We
have to be courageous by choice – and f*** me if that isn’t the scariest kind
of courage there is.
The conclusion after assessing all the
influencing factors is that a decision can only be based on what is needed by
the mother. THIS is why being ‘pro-choice’ is so important: To respect
individual autonomy, to stand by the idea that even a wrong choice for you is the
right choice for her, and hers to make.
But that’s just the start of being
pro-choice. Some might respect The Doctor for standing back, but from Clara’s
position, it is clear that The Doctor is making a crucial error:
“Womankind: it’s your choice. Some decisions are too
important not to make on your own.”
~ The
Doctor
The decision itself is a mother’s alone. But that doesn’t mean leaving her without
perspective, without support or assurance or information or a companion should
she ask for one to be there with her. Being
pro-choice does not mean removing yourself from an issue. It means being there
before, during and after the choice is made, so as to allow the maximum number
of choices a person could ask for. The idea of non-influence fails, the
smallest baby has moon-sized repercussions to the lives around it. If you make
the choice to walk out on that, to be a ‘non-influence’, then stay out. But if
you want to actually help, let the mother know it. Be an influence. Let them
know your stance as pro-life or pro-death, and let them know what you plan to
do based on their decisions. And if you are a total a-hole, raising a picket
outside a clinic while having no intention of actually helping a mother raise a
baby, maybe reconsider that instead of shaming people for making a difficult
choice, you could make it an easier choice by focusing on making our galaxy a
fit place for a little alien to live.
The adventure winds down in the TARDIS with
Clara ripping into The Doctor, and ends with the rift Danny foresaw coming
between Clara and The Doctor in the last episode, where the Doctor pushes her
too far by making her follow an order without explaining it. By leaving her to
make a decision with such a narrow margin of choice – by forcing her to believe
any action she took would kill without a promised cause – he made her hate him
quite a bit.
***
Now, when making a decision about your
abortion, or in the unlikely case that a planet you are part of has a moon that
is about to hatch birth, remember:
There are times when a mother is worn out
by births, unprepared, or suffering, and will not survive the process even
should they live through it. In such cases an abortion is a very necessary
thing.
But there are also times when life is stagnant;
a mother is fat, happy, but afraid of change and the pain of it. Times when a
planet has turned in upon itself because it believes there is nothing great in
life: and in such cases, there is a very, very good reason to choose to have a
baby.
“The mid 21st Century. Humankind starts creeping off
into the stars. Spreads its way through the galaxy to the very edges of the
universe. And it… Endures. Till the end of time.”
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