Is life a gift?

'We do not grieve the children we contracepted out of existence because life in principle is neither good nor bad.' I'm afraid in logical terms your apodosis and protasis are woefully estranged here, Jude. Sex without contraception does not necessarily lead to the birth of a child. We don't grieve the children we 'abstained' out of existence either, not because of some abstract value judgement on life, but because such thinking rests upon a bizarre conflation of causality and reasonable responsibility. I'm sure you're already conversant with the birds and the bees, but men and women aren't knocking around full of miniature baby-halves - merely the apparatus to start a process which may, eventually, result in a human being.

It's impossible to contracept a child out of existence. A child has to exist before it can be taken out of existence. I value life, because I exist in the knowledge that there's nothing either side of it. The only pain I'll ever feel about that contemplation is while I'm living. There's nothing more mind-teasing than the incomprehensible eagerly avowed - Dennett

I don't know what the RCs are talking about, but in general, I could see my own life as a gift in the sense that the origin of my existence had nothing to do with me. I was "given into the world" by my parents and for that reason my life is a gift to me. That makes sense but it doesn't really tell me anything particularly useful. This formulation is usually used to urge people to make the best use of their time on earth, but there are many other reasons to do that. The notion that the life of a child is a gift to the parents strikes me as silly because the parents had quite a lot to do with the conception of the child. The RCs might argue that all life comes from God, so therefore all life is a gift from God; but even if you believe their premise, the parents still had to take action to bring the child into existence. The life of a child might be a blessing for the parents (or a curse!), but I can't see it as a gift. The child did not just materialize from thin air. Speaking as someone who has never been married, religious, or a parent, I am of course highly qualified to answer this question. "You don't need the light of the Lord to read the handwriting on the wall." Copies of Warsaw Tales available through www.new-ink.org

The short, brutally literalist answer to the question is 'No'. A 'gift' is a concept that exists only in the context of living, aware creatures - therefore life cannot be defined as a subset of itself.

Yeah, similar answer. If 'life' is your existence, then you can't be given it as a gift, because you are not there to be gifted anything before it. I guess religious people think of it as a gift because they imagine an existence before and after 'life' that is pretty crap by comparison.