People who defend legal abortion often admit that the unborn are technically “human” but claim they are not “persons.” These nebulous arguments can be seductive and are popular with high school and college students who identify as “pro-choice.” However, one of the best answers to these arguments goes like this:
9-Week Human Embryo. Ed Uthman. CC BY 2.0
“We only question the personhood of someone we wish to harm.”
Try to think of a time when a human being’s personhood was questioned for a motive other than using, marginalizing, harming, or killing him. From American slavery to the Nazi holocaust, the whole point of questioning the personhood of others is to deny them human rights. It’s a rhetorical (and arbitrary) technique used to exclude rather than include human beings. [Do we want "inclusion" or not?]
Natural law principles forbid killing innocent human beings or treating them as if they weren’t really human, and the simple truth is that all human beings are persons, no exceptions.
Abortion is a human rights issue. Stephen Schwartz is a philosopher who shows, through non-religious reasoning, that none of these differences between born and unborn humans deprives any human being of basic rights. He summarizes his argument with the acronym SLED:
S – Size: A baby in the womb might be tiny, but how big do you have to be to be a person? And who decides? A baby in the womb is the exact size he or she is supposed to be for his or her age. A person’s intrinsic dignity should never be determined by his or her size.
L – Level of Development: Unborn babies can’t think like you or I do, but neither can newborn babies or some adults with disabilities. Feeling pain or perceiving experiences (what is called “sentience”) also doesn’t make us human persons; after all, rats and pigeons are sentient. Our value and our human rights come not from what we can do, but simply from what we are: human beings.
E – Environment: A baby in the womb isn’t born yet, but so what? Our location cannot change our value or who we are.
D – Degree of Dependency: You’ll hear it said, “It can’t live without the mother!” But that’s an argument against abortion! It makes no sense that we consider it despicable to abandon a newborn baby who cannot live without total dependence on another, but justifiable to kill an unborn baby who cannot live without total dependence on another. A civilized society protects those who are weaker and more vulnerable; we don’t authorize their killings.
We shouldn't be fooled or intimidated. The abortion advocates’ murky philosophical discussion of “personhood” is not a noble or nuanced search for what is true about the human person. It’s simply an excuse for one group of humans to dehumanize, oppress, and kill another group of humans. When faced with these arguments, simply ask, “Why does the difference between born and unborn humans matter? Shouldn’t we protect all human beings no matter how different they are from us?”
Ω Adapted from Made This Way: How to Prepare Kids to Face Today’s Tough Moral Issues, by Trent Horn and Leila Miller.
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