Right to Live Amendment

I believe that unborn children are living human beings and that elective abortion kills an innocent and defenseless person. Now is that just my opinion, or is it really true?

Let's consider whether the unborn are alive or dead. Unborn children have metabolism, something dead things do not have. The unborn grow and develop which are more signs of life. The unborn respond to stimulus and pain. No one that I know of has ever explained how something that is not alive could do these things. So the unborn are definitely alive.

Where do humans come from? Well, they come from other humans of course. The Law of Biogenesis states that life is produced from the living and that when living things reproduce; their offspring are the same kind of living things as the parents. No one has ever observed an exception to this law, so what kind of thing do you expect human reproduction to produce? Human of course! So the unborn are both living and human.

Here is where a lot of people have a problem. What is a person anyway? Many have tried to define a person based upon their birth, but must one be born to be a real person? Well, what is the difference between being born and being unborn anyway?

Size is one difference, but does size make the person? Men are generally larger than women. Does that make men generally more of a person than women, or a man more important than a woman? Maybe you think there is a certain threshold of size that makes a person. What if someone doesn't quite make the size, are they not a person at all? And can we just kill someone if they are a millimeter too small? No, it seems to me that size has no bearing on personhood.

Level of development is another attribute that is used to define personhood. The unborn might be unable to survive outside the mother before a certain stage of development, to some making them a non-person. What about a newborn, is a newborn a person? Can newborn children survive without someone to care for them? Chickens can walk within a few minutes of hatching. Does that make them more of a person than a 6 month old baby who cannot yet walk? No, personhood has nothing to do with ability or level of development.

Environment, or location is also used as a test of personhood. The unborn are totally contained within the mother, so some claim a personal right of mothers to kill and evict these unwanted intruders. But is a woman less of a person in her car, for instance than she is on the sidewalk? If she is a person in the car, isn't she still a person when she gets out? Those who think personhood changes with location have no problem supporting the barbaric practice of partial birth abortion. Apparently, if the babies were just a few inches further away from their mothers, they would be persons. But since they lack those few inches of separation, it is alright to suck their brains out and sell their body parts because they are not real persons. If you subscribe to the argument that environment is a test of personhood, you have no choice but to accept this practice as consistent with your belief.

Dependency is also used as a test of personhood. This argument would deny personhood to the unborn child because of dependency upon the body of the mother. Does that mean that someone totally dependent on an artificial heart is not a person? How about someone that needs weekly dialysis?

Ethically, none of these differences between the born and the unborn have any bearing on personhood, and so there is no good reason to deny personhood to the unborn. So the unborn are living human persons and therefore should not be killed. And that is not just my opinion, it is the truth.

- Dennis Petticrew

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