Given America’s sad history with slavery and the shame with which
it is regarded today one might think that defenders of Roe v Wade (1973) would
be a little more cautious about the rhetoric they use in defense of what they
regard as an absolute right to abortion. The two are connected. Recently,
defenders of Roe v Wade (1973) submitted enough requests to the State of
Nebraska to justify a license plate that reads, “My Body, My Choice.” They did
so in response to a pro-life plate that said, “Choose Life.” The rhetoric “My
Body, My Choice” is essentially identical to one of the defenses for chattel
slavery as practiced by Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries. Slave owners
argued that slaves were their property and it is no one else’s business what
they did with their property. Paul Finkelman writes,
“[th]roughout the Revolution, southern politicians argued that slaves were
property, not persons” (p. 113). Were human beings capable of being property,
that would be true but it begs the question to assume that humans can be
property. In order to justify this way of thinking both pro-abortionists and
slavers had to deprive the slaves and infants in utero of their
humanity. The pro-abortionists do this with the slogan, “My Body, My Choice.”
Like their slave-owning forebears, they too must deprive the humans within
their bodies of humanity. There is no question, of course, whether the pregnant
woman is involved in having a baby. What is in question is the status of the
baby. The slogan, “My Body, My Choice” assumes what must be proven, that the
infant developing within the pregnant mother is a mere appendage of the mother.
All of the evidence of what I am aware is to the contrary. As has
been noted before in this space, in
the study of human biology, we are said to develop from an embryo
(a zygote , i.e., a fertilized ovum then to a blastocyst) in the
first 8 weeks to a fetus, which covers the remaining 7 months. To borrow
a bit more from that earlier essay, infant humans are humans.
Humans conceive human embryos. Those embryos develop into human
infants. Our English word embyro is just the Greek word ἔμβρυον (Embyon) for foetus
(fetus) and Foetus is Latin for infant. From a biological
perspective, all the stuff that determines what we become is already present.
From a logical perspective, it makes no sense to say that we become
human either in utero or after. Who says? On what basis? Any answer is
bound to be either entirely subjective or self-serving.
So, from all that most of us know about basic human biology tells
us that the premise of the slogan, “My Body, My Choice” is false. There are, in
fact, two bodies in question here: the woman’s and the baby’s. Yes, the woman’s
body is intimately involved in the process, so much so that (ordinarily)
without the assistance of the mother, that the infant cannot survive without
her. Nevertheless, the baby is also a human person. Whatever ignorance
beclouded the minds of the majority in Roe and Doe in 1973, such ignorance is
no longer possible. We know too much. Anyone who has ever watched the credits
of the old Drew Carey Show arguably knows more about human development
than did Justice Blackmon in Roe.
The facts will not permit us to grant the premise. It is not “My
Body” alone in question. Therefore, the question of whether to end that second,
helpless, infant life is not merely “My Choice” anymore than it was ever the
slaver’s choice to buy, sell, rape, or murder slaves. Notice the attached
poster. They were being sold as if they were a commodity. They were dehumanized
and commodified in the same way that rice and fabrics were sold as commodities.
In the few occasions I have had civil discussions with defenders
of abortion on demand I have been struck both by how similar their rhetoric is
to that of the American slavers and by how unconscious they are of that
relationship. Were I to ask them in they are willing to buy and sell their
neighbor or, to press the analogy, to take their unconscious, sleeping neighbor
to a clinic to have them dismembered, they would be justifiably horrified but
at least some of them, are positively proud of their decision to do the same to
their unborn children. It does not appear to have occurred to them that they
are using the same rhetoric and logic of the slavers whom they rightly abhor.
They speak about unborn persons in the very same categories used by the slavers
of the 18th and 19th centuries. They treat unborn humans as bad or worse than
the slavers did their slaves.
Just as human beings are not mere appendages (your liver does not
have its own DNA, if left in safety, a human embryo develops into a mature
human, that is not true of your heart) so too human beings are not like rice
and beans. The stealing, buying, and selling of humans is a great evil.
Certainly man stealing is a sin (Ex 21:16) and the “peculiar institution” of
slavery as practiced by Americans in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries was
sinful. To the best of my knowledge, it was not exactly like slavery practiced
in the ancient near east, which is reflect in scripture, or even like the
slavery practiced in the Greco-Roman world, with which Scripture is familiar.
The point here, however, is that the same folk who rightly decry
the evil of human trafficking, who denounce heatedly the shameful American
history of slavery, nevertheless speak (and apparently think) about unborn
humans in the same categories as the slavers they deplore. It is your body but
it is not only your body. All that we know from science and experience tells us
that human developing within you is a person, endowed by his Creator with
certain unalienable rights. It is one of the great wonders of our deeply
confused age that so many are so self-deceived that they cannot or will not see
it.
