It’s rare for columnists these days to wade into the abortion debate, so it’s worth noting for that alone.
But this column in the Edmonton Sun got SMU thinking about the cross-purposes nature of the abortion debate. This column represents the “women’s rights” argument. It doesn’t try to argue that a fetus isn’t a human being, it simple reflects the author’s own belief that the woman’s rights are paramount.
It’s an intractable argument, because it has no rational basis. Simply ascribing one human rights over another is a form of social totalitarianism, without logical support, except perhaps in cases where both lives are in jeopardy from taking a child to term. It’s only logical to remove a fetuses “human rights” if you can logically argue that it has yet to develop into a “human.”
Just as intractable is the “pro-life” — or “anti-choice” — argument that life simply begins at conception, therefore all abortion is murder. It relies on the false premise that “life” is synonymous with “humanity.” And it’s not.
Not everything that has life is considered human, by definition. We separate humanity from other animals because of human traits, including self-awareness/consciouness of existence.
Look it up: most dictionaries will define human as a short form for “human being,” to merely describe the species, to be sure. But they’ll also define it as having the traits of the rest of humanity.
“Life” is not synonymous with “human” because people develop, biologically, in stages. For example, prior to the seventh month, most fetuses haven’t developed a connected parietal lobe in their brain, so they have no self-awareness, no consciousness.
To go beyond that biological reality — to go searching for some earlier, deitically-produced “soul — is to tred into the realm of blind faith, not logic.
Lacking the key trait that separates their cognitive developmental process from other animals, we can still call a second-term fetus “alive”. But it has no “human rights” because it simply isn’t human yet. It doesn’t meet the criteria.
This same cross-purposes argument is raised regarding people who are being kept alive. We recognize these people as human for the life they lived prior to becoming vegetative — but we assign their rights to someone else, because they have no logical way to exercise them themselves. One of those assigned rights is the right to decide if the individual lives or dies.
If a fully developed human who has lost the essential traits of their humanity doesn’t get to “choose life,” why should a fetus that hasn’t even reached the potential to be self-aware?
Let’s put this another way: if a rancher aborts an early-stage calf fetus to save the mother, we don’t call that fetus a “cow.” We call it an aborted calf fetus. If people want to call the product of abortions “aborted human fetuses,” more power to them. At least it won’t continue the nonsensical notion that human rights begin at conception.
Slightly More Upright 