For nearly 50 years, conservative Christians in US marched, strategized and prayed. And then, on an ordinary Friday morning in the last week of June, the day they had dreamed of finally came. Ending the constitutional right to abortion by overturning Roe v. Wade took a decades-long campaign. The common argument for abortion is that women have right over their bodies. Any serious thinker is reluctant to consider bodies “property” because they cannot be sold or bought. The body rights present a “weak package” of limited property rights and are more likely personal rights than property rights. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Asked Cain. The same question we hear from women. They say: “It is my body and I can do what I want with it!” The latter remark betrays the same mind-set exemplified in Cain’s rhetorical question, namely that one has no responsibility to anybody but oneself, and this is nobody’s business but my own. According to E. Levinas, my responsibility to, for and in place of the Other, i.e. as substitute for the Other, extends as far as ‘my’ own body. I am in the universe as a being in becoming. The universe protects me and I become. I am like a zygote in the universe. Levinas bluntly states, “To recognize the Other is to give.” To “recognize” i.e. to respond to or face my responsibility before the Other is not to give out of one’s resources and possessions, but to offer one’s very power of possession and self-possession as such, to sacrifice nothing other than oneself, one’s own person or one’s own body. Levinas cryptically writes, “Ethics slips into me before freedom.” We can never discuss freedom without responsibility. “The word I means here I am, answering for everything and for everyone.” As Levinas suggests, one without a body is also without a voice, without discourse, incapable of any saying, then one with a body, e.g. the body’s/foetus’ beating, might yet count as a Saying, albeit a voiceless and merely bodily signification, an offering of signs: “Here I am! Feel me here!” Is this beating enough to make an ethical demand on the Same, commanding one’s asymmetrical responsibility? Is this beating not already a Saying? Remember that this proclamation—“Here I am!”—is synonymous with the very incarnation of the body.

If pregnancy can adequately be described as the beating of the Other in the Same, then, it must be asked, is it the Other who speaks and commands, i.e. the properly ethical Other, or feminine alterity, the familiar/familial Other before whom, perhaps, I may not be asymmetrically responsible? At any rate, an issue like abortion should not be centred around the question of a person’s inalienable rights nor around the pseudo-scientific question about when human life begins, but rather on the question of the proprietorship of the body. The abortion debate frequently centres on who has more pressing rights—the woman/mother or the foetus. Once the argument reaches this point, neither side recognizes that the two lives are bound together. On one side, the woman is treated merely as a vessel—an incubator. On the other, the foetus is typically viewed as a disposable lump of tissue. The question then is really not the dichotomous one of whose body it is—the mother’s/carrier’s or the baby’s/foetus’—but it is rather a question about the nature of the bodies involved in the relation or, more precisely, about the nature of the relation itself. In other words, is the unborn faceless, i.e. is the unborn mute because it is far too intimate to have to speak from a distance, or does the unborn speak a proto-ethical word? Is the relation masculine or feminine, proximate or remote and, most importantly, personal or impersonal? Is it an I-Thou or I-It relation? It is I! If, as Levinas suggests, one without a body is also without a voice, without discourse, incapable of any Saying, then one with a body, e.g. the body’s/foetus’ beating, might yet count as a Saying, albeit a voiceless and merely bodily signification, an offering of signs: “Here I am! Feel me here!” Is this beating enough to make an ethical demand on the Same, commanding one’s asymmetrical responsibility? Is this beating not already a Saying? Remember that this proclamation—“Here I am!”—is synonymous with the very incarnation of the body, and remember as well that only the disincarnate is mute. Europe seems to follow an anti-life culture where there are no births to tally the deaths. Does this culture pose a death threat to themselves?

Ethically, however, this same feminist and this same activist should find herself “troubled” by that “underlying” ethical relation—for, given that none of us can give due justice to the claims of all Others in the world, particularly when their interests often conflict, who among us then can actually live without an untroubled conscience? We are only pointing out an underrepresented possibility that troubles the libertarian and/or existentialist rights-based ethicist, and not definitively to formulate a prescriptive ethic from a reading of Levinas. I would conclude that birth and death are beyond our controls. God’s play of being lets being without a why. Everything comes, tarries and leaves. We are not masters of the game, we are receivers in the game. We can gratefully receive or reject. We are made responsible. God has defined birth and death.