Personhood does not depend on size

9-Week Human Embryo. Ed Uthman. CC BY 2.0

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:

“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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Kids tragic victims of Western culture

Photo: PxHere

Mental health problems among young people in Britain are a public health crisis, says Dr Max Pemberton, who works full-time as a psychiatrist in the National Health Service. This is his assessment of what life means for incredibly high numbers of young people:

An epidemic of mental health problems affecting the young is becoming a full-scale public health emergency, with new data showing that more than a million children needed treatment for serious mental health problems in the past year.

The data also showed a startling increase in the number of under-18s admitted to hospital with serious eating disorders — a jump of 82 per cent in two years.

As an eating disorders specialist, I have seen first hand the increase in the number of patients being referred to my clinic, as well as those increasingly unwell patients for whom hospital admission is now the only option.

 As to the main cause for what he calls "this terribly sad situation" he identifies a lack of parental control and guidance of young people's use of social media:

The first [cause] is the rise of smartphones and social media. According to a survey conducted in 2021, 58 per cent of children aged from eight to 11 have smartphones — and 89 per cent of UK children aged eight to 17 had their own social media profiles.

We all know that images of models and celebrities in adverts are airbrushed in order to sell products, but increasingly this is also now the case for images posted by individuals, some of whom tweak and alter pictures using filtering and editing apps.

This means young children and teens are being bombarded with images that appear to have been taken spontaneously but, in reality, have been manipulated to create impossibly perfect faces and bodies.

No wonder young people feel under increasing pressure to copy these unrealistic images — with the result they are more likely to diet or work out to change their own body shape. In those who are susceptible, often due to underlying psychological and emotional difficulties, this can develop into an eating disorder.

I worked in eating disorders for ten years and many of my young patients told me they'd become obsessed with images they saw online, particularly things such as 'thigh gaps' (a space at the top of the thighs) on people's Instagram accounts.

Yet they entirely failed to realise that only a tiny fraction of the population naturally look like this, and that many of the images had been digitally manipulated.

Young boys need fathers

Eating disorders are not a minor matter. Dr Pemberton highlights heartrending statistics:

 ... [E]ating disorders have the highest mortality of any mental illness, and one in five of those with a disorder will die from it.

That is a horrendous statistic — yet people are having to wait years in order to get the treatment they need. 

Therefore, it is a mark of shame for British society that attention at government level, nor within the public as a whole, is not given to this emergency. Dr Pemberton emphasises that health resources provided are inadequate, with "shamefully long waiting lists for those who need help the most".

It is a scandal that clinicians working in services for the most unwell patients are powerless to do anything except watch as they deteriorate to the extent they need hospital admission.

  Back to the role of parents in this social catastrophe. Dr Pemberton offers advice:

So what can parents do? Find out who your children are following on social media and why; and encourage them to unfollow those people who aren't portraying real bodies positively.

Parents who suspect a child is affected by this disorder should push as hard as they can for referrals to specials services. He suggests getting support from eating disorder organisations such as the British group BEAT.

Finally, there is an excellent book, Getting Better Bite By Bite by Professor Janet Treasure, which can also help.

But the question also arises as to why increasing numbers of children have "underlying psychological and emotional difficulties", to use Dr Pemberton's words, which make them susceptible to unbalanced influence by social media, and thus, to eating disorders.

He goes some way to answering that question in another item in his newspaper column, where he features actor Hugh Jackman's affection for his father, who had recently died. He reports:

Jackman said: 'My mother left when I was eight, so my father raised us. He taught me really great values. A lot of who I am today is because of him.'

I've no doubt that it must have been incredibly painful to lose his father, but I hope he can take some solace in having had such a wonderful relationship. So many other men, unfortunately, cannot say the same.

All too often, families split up and the father drifts off, but the damage caused by this loss of a role model can last for ever.

I'll probably get pilloried for saying it, but after seeing troubled young men for years, my conclusion is that young boys need a father. 

Despite the fashionable antifamily sentiment that Dr Pemberton refers to, hands-on parenting by a male and a female parent are certainly the foundation of a society that is truly protective of its children, providing them, by means of a strong attitude of social solidarity, the resources and safeguards that healthy physical and mental growth demands.

Conversely, it is becoming increasingly plain to see that the so-called progressives of Western society are not the heroes of the era, but are cowards who prefer to militate for soft, culturally virtuous, goals rather than do the heavy lifting of confronting the corporate and political powers over the creation of conditions that support family life, and over the removal of conditions that perpetuate inequality.

To my mind, the economic and social injustice prevalent in US society that should be the progressives' target was made vivid by the scandalous fact that railway workers, who in November had declared strike action over stalled negotiations on pay and conditions, were left after the legislated settlement without any paid sick leave. Any self-respecting social movement should hang its head in shame at that state of affairs existing in the 21st Century.  

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There is no right side of history

Niccolo Macchiavelli ... saw role for political myth-making. Photo PxHere 

"I’m a political progressive. The idea that 'history' is on our side—which we’re sure to hear during this 118th Congress—is a dangerous myth," declares William Deresiewicz in his Free Press article on January 2, 2023.

He makes some good points:

The phrase embodies a specific view of history, the idea that the course of human events—with whatever stops and starts and temporary setbacks—traces an inevitable upward path. The notion dates back to the nineteenth century, if not earlier: to Hegel and Marx, to the liberal or “Whig” historians, to the Progressive movement itself. "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."

And those on the “wrong side” of history? “History will judge them”—will judge Donald Trump, will judge Bill Barr, will judge Dave Chappelle and J.K. Rowling, will judge all the bads.

But history does not have sides. It does not take sides. The progressive view of history is not an observation. It’s a theory. It’s a myth that takes its place alongside other, different, historical myths: the belief that history is cyclical; the belief that history represents a long decline from some imagined Golden Age; the belief that we are heading towards apocalypse, or Messiah, or both.

[[[[[[[[[[

I have lived long enough to know that history is perfectly capable of slamming into reverse and backing up at 50 miles an hour. It happened with Ronald Reagan. It happened with Vladimir Putin. It happened with Trump.

Yet who’s to say what constitutes “reverse”? Who’s to say where history is headed, even in the long run? To take but one example: In The Great Exception, the historian Jefferson Cowie argues that the New Deal and its progeny—the liberal heyday from FDR to LBJ—was not the norm from which we’ve lamentably swerved. It was itself an anomaly, the result of a unique and unrepeatable confluence of circumstances. The norm, he says, is what preceded and followed it. “It might be more accurate to think of the ‘Reagan revolution,’” Cowie writes, “as the ‘Reagan restoration.’”

As for “history will judge”—the moral side of the progressive myth—it is no less a delusion. “History,” of course, means the future, and “judge” means condemn. But to say that the future will condemn x or y is to assume that the future will look like “us”—that by the time the future rolls around (whenever that may be) everybody will agree with us.

Which means that everybody will agree, full stop. But when has everybody ever agreed? When have there not been “sides”? After all, we are the future to those who came before us. And I can tell you that in the 1980s, the left was just as certain that Reagan and his henchmen would be judged by history. Yet here we are, and half the country still believes he farted rainbows. 

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Why does this matter? First of all, because it makes for complacency. History, in the progressive myth, is a kind of plus factor in political struggle: an invisible force, like something out of physics, that adds its strength to ours. History is on our side—we can’t lose! For decades now, Democrats have been assuring themselves that the coming of a majority-minority America will guarantee a future liberal hegemony. Latinos in particular are supposedly the cavalry that’s riding to the rescue. Well, now it’s beginning to look as if they just might ride in the other direction. As for millennials—a vast electoral cohort that currently skews progressive, and thus the latest leftist messianic hope—people have a funny way of getting more conservative as they get older.

[[[[[[[[[[[

 The progressive myth of history also makes for arrogance and condescension. I said that the notion of history as a kind of force that blows through human affairs is like something out of physics—but really, it’s like something out of Christianity. It is a secularized version of the Holy Spirit. “History is on our side” is a secularized version of “God is on our side.” “History will judge them” is an update of “God will judge them.” To believe in the Holy Spirit is to believe that it acts through—that it fills—some people but not others. To believe in “history,” in progress as a metaphysical principle, is to believe in the existence of a progressive class: the ones who push history forward, the ones who are filled with the future.

In other words, us. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Which means that we have the right—the duty—to teach others how to live. How to speak, think, eat, spend, make love, raise their children, vote. You know how enraging evangelical preachers can be, how insulting it is to hear them talk about how sinful and benighted the secular are? That is how most people, including a lot of rank-and-file Democrats, feel about the self-anointed progressive class.

[[[[[[[[[[

... [T]his is where the bad behavior enters in. As soon as you declare a “crisis,” an “emergency”—another word you hear a lot these days—you give yourself permission to suspend the rules: to bury a story, to suppress dissent, to betray the principles you’re supposed to stand for. History has charged you with a special duty, after all; the future rests upon your shoulders.

No, it hasn’t. No, it doesn’t. Talk of the right side of history is, at bottom, propaganda—an attempt to persuade us that the largest issues have already been decided. 

As the new political season begins, let us not forget that nothing is, in fact, inevitable. The future is open. Let no one presume to foreclose it.

It's a shame that history isn't given much attention by higher education institutions and their clients these days:

'That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach' — Aldous Huxley (author of Brave New World;  (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963).

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Dangers of the spirit world highlighted

We have wandered away from our spiritual traditions and forgotten the lessons from millennia of experience. Though we may have left behind the supernatural, it has not left us behind. Religion used to provide answers and rituals to help us understand the things we cannot understand with only our wits and our senses. Now, increasingly, we search for answers in ways previous generations knew to be dangerous, and so we play with spiritual forces we do not understand and cannot control.

… [O]ur society no longer teaches these rules, but often celebrates breaking them. The problem with that is simply this: God is real, and the rules have not changed. Evil spirits work personally to tempt us into sin and collectively to normalize sin in society. Their goal is to coax us away from God and into a subservient relationship with them. They play nice in the beginning, but when they have a hold on us, they turn cruel and controlling. They strive to isolate us and drive us to despair — or sometimes possession.

These words of warning are from The Exorcism Files, by Adam Blai, a Catholic layman, psychologist, and consultant to the Diocese of Pittsburgh on exorcism. Here’s a link to a page on his website that gives the “basics” of what the layperson needs to know about the devil and his work. "Blai tells you what to stay away from, and warns very strongly against messing with any of it. It’s very helpful, and ought to sober anybody tempted to dabble in witchcraft, divination, psychic consultation, or any form of the occult."

People in our era who follow the herd to abandon established religion to go their own way spiritually, put their lives and souls n a precarious predicament. The latest such case arises in an article on the rapid rise in the followers of shamanism in England and Wales. The danger lies in this:

Shamanism is not a unified field of work. Nor is it organised under any regulating body. The title of “shaman” is not protected or even well defined. As a participant, you must carefully consider who you approach to work with, as the standards from origin cultures may not have transferred over.

Western practitioners do not always fully adopt the shamanic ethics needed to practise safely. This can mean clients may be left with information and experiences they do not fully understand or know how to work with.

Evgenia Fotiou, an academic who has studied the globalisation of shamanism and the erasure of indigenous practices, warns that:

Westerners see no conflict in the appropriation of indigenous knowledge. They believe it is universal and everyone has the right to it … It is rare that westerners will make the necessary sacrifices and adjustments in their lifestyle to fully follow that path.

Contemporary practitioners must examine their motivation to work in this way and break out of exploitative and romantic views of indigenous peoples. It can take a long time to train and develop your work without stepping into cultural appropriation.

There’s also a risk that people with possible mental health issues such as substance use disorder or psychosis might see shamanism as a way to explain and justify their behaviour or symptoms (such as drug taking, delusions or dissociative states) as spiritual experience, and so not seek conventional treatment.

Though "shamanism has been linked with both empowerment and a greater sense of community, as well as a stronger connection with the Earth",  the key takeaway is that it is path to exploitation of others, as well as to predation by the demonic spirits as individuals do their own thing away from structures that preserve the well-being of all involved by the provision of ancient standards.

For more on Blai's findings from his experience in contending with the demonic world, go to this video:

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Incarnation: The unity of divinity and dust

Detail from Georges de la Tour's Adoration of the Shepherds (1644)

 Let’s start with an easy question: What is the Incarnation?

— Well, I’m not sure it is such an easy one. First of all, it is an impossible paradox, because it is the account of the union of two incommensurate entities: the uncreated being of God and our being of dust. The great Christian wonder is that mysterious union. […] We need to remember that in becoming flesh, the Word didn’t simply occupy one human body as a guest for 33 years. Human nature as such ⁠— that is, flesh ⁠— was invested with a potential for divinity. And so being a human being in the wake of the Incarnation isn’t the same as being a human being before the Incarnation, whether or not one believes in Christ and whether one even knows that Christ ever walked on this Earth. We like to talk about things being ‘systemic’ these days, and something systemic happened to human flesh through the Incarnation that opened it to transcendence and to eternity.

Ω From an interview with Erik Varden, a Norwegian bishop and Trappist monk. Read the splendid interview in full here. See Varden's own spiritual writing here.

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'Each of us is willed ... necessary'

“We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.”

Pope Benedict XVI, Homily, St. Peter’s Square, April 25, 2005 

God and the reason for existence

Love made plain through action. Photo: Thomas Leuthard PxHere

Samuel Wells again* puts his finger on the pulse of our times in this edited version of a sermon preached at St. Martin-in-the-Fields on Christmas Eve just past:

The first sentence of perhaps the most important story ever written is this: “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1). This sentence is itself a nod to the first sentence in the Bible, which starts, “When all things began …” (Genesis 1:1). But it’s saying something more profound than that earlier sentence. It’s saying communication — the desire to share and relate, the urge to engage and listen and receive and open up — is at the very core of all things; indeed, it is the reason for the creation of all things: “The Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

In other words, the essence that created existence, the forever that conceived of time, the everywhere that brought about here is, at its very heart, about communication — nonviolent communication, partnership, relationship, togetherness. In fact, that’s the purpose of existence: to communicate fully with one another and to communicate back with God. There’s nothing more important than that.

But here we run into two problems. The first is, not all communication is healthy — some words are hurtful, cruel, and destructive. (This was true even before the invention of Twitter.) The second is, words are sometimes only words. Words aren’t always rooted in feelings, actions, or integrity: sometimes words can be so far from actuality they might just as well be called lies.

In 1990 the rock band Extreme released a ballad that struck a chord with many people whose partners were quick with the terms of endearment, but whose way of showing it made those words empty. “Saying ‘I love you’,” goes the song, “Is not the words I want to hear from you … More than words is all you have to do to make it real. Then you wouldn't have to say that you love me —’cause I’d already know.” Rock ballads don’t get more searing than that.

Listen, with lyrics, here

Now I don’t know anything about the religious persuasion of the members of Extreme, but I wonder if they’ve realised, all the thousands of times they’ve been called upon to sing their most famous song these last thirty years, that they are perfectly expressing the heart of what Christmas is all about.

Communication is at the heart of all things, because the real big bang that started this whole thing off was God’s decision to be in relationship — for the persons of the Trinity to communicate as fully beyond themselves as they do with each other. Humanity is the purpose of creation, because humanity is the partner with whom God can be fully in relationship. But it turns out humanity finds ways to twist communication from its created purpose as the texture of relationship to a sinister parody of relationship in cruelty, and the outright undermining of relationship in lies.

There’s no Virginia Axline to come alongside wounded, fearful, and withdrawn humanity and create trust through patience and understanding. Many prophets offer words; many brave souls offer example. But collectively, humanity’s response to God embodies the words of that song: “More than words is all you have to do to make it real …”

The most important sentence ever written

Which brings us to the most significant sentence in the Bible, and I would suggest the most important sentence ever written. A sentence about communication, and how communication turns into trust and relationship. Fourteen verses into that same story I referred to earlier, a story known as John’s gospel, we find these priceless, peerless, perfect words: “And the Word became flesh, and lived among us.”

Here lies the fulfilment of the whole reason for the existence of all things. Everything that happened before this moment is backdrop and preparation. Everything that has happened since has been echo and embedding. This is the central moment, in which God’s original desire to be with us becomes more than words.

Jesus appears, fully human — born of a human mother in pretty desperate, shoddy, forsaken, neglected, rough, and inhospitable conditions. Let’s just say the ox wasn’t too particular where it went to the bathroom and the ass wasn’t too fussed about where it brought up last night’s fodder.

But Jesus is also fully divine, for the heavens ring with the song of angels and a star guides the Magi to the place of his birth. Jesus is the perfect communication of God to us, more than words, making it real, and Jesus is the perfect communication of us to God, how easy it can be to show God how we feel.

The whole of Jesus’s life is like Virginia Axline’s year with young Dibs. Jesus is creating an environment for us where we can live beyond cruelty and lies, and finally find ways to dwell beyond violence in patience, understanding and trust. He is in search of our self, listening, not judging, offering open enquiry not closed questions, inviting us to wonder and discover and allowing us to find our own solutions at our own pace. Jesus is the Word of God that offers us the epitome of communication, through which we may find a relationship that lasts forever.

Yet there’s no naïveté in Christmas. There is simplicity, and a degree of innocence — but no naïveté. Because we all know that cruelty and lies enter Christ’s story soon enough. They’re there in Herod’s court when the Magi go to Jerusalem by mistake and they’re there when Herod sends soldiers to kill all the young children in Bethlehem. And they catch up with Jesus in the end, when his communication meets the world’s violence, and for a moment violence prevails.

But the light of communication and relationship shines in the darkness of violence, and promises that, if we can only find time and patience, we will eventually see trust and relationship emerge from even the most violent of our failures to find words.

This is the wonder of Christmas: The Word becomes more than words. And inspires us to let the Holy Spirit of patience and tenderness turn our own violent frustration and anger into relationship and trust, and eventually to let those words become flesh, in embodied gestures and commitments of solidarity and love.

It’s because the Word became flesh, because God came among us to embody utter relationship with us, because God has faced the worst of our cruelty and lies, because God has shown us, because God has made it real, that we gather on Christmas Eve, with stars so brightly shining, and say to God, boldly, bravely, gladly: “You don’t have to say that you love us — ’cause we already know.”

Ω Rev. Dr Samuel Wells is the vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, and Visiting Professor of Christian Ethics at King’s College London. 

* Previously posted on this blog:

    The twin dimensions of Christmas

    The logic of God gleams at Christmas

Ω Read the sermon in full here

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