ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, August 26 2010

'Personhood' theory endangers human rights
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

After months of unsuccessfully fighting against Senate Bill 793, a new Missouri law that requires clinics to offer ultrasounds and information about fetal development to women seeking abortions, Planned Parenthood officials and their ilk are trying a new tack. They are trading their charge that optional ultrasounds constitute a threat to women's rights — a nonsensical complaint that never got much traction — for the claim that the law rests on religious and philosophical opinions rather than facts.

The complaint hinges on these words in the law: "The life of each human being begins at conception. Abortion will terminate the life of a separate, unique, living human being."

Sounds pretty straightforward right? Wrong, says Paula Gianino, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri. As she told the Post-Dispatch recently, "Those are not sentiments that all the world's religions, or all the people in the state, believe in."

Actually, those are not sentiments at all. They are statements of fact. They can be verified by most any embryology textbook, including those written decades ago, when abortion-rights activists still were claiming that "no one knows when life begins." As the 1975 edition of Medical Embryology put it, "The development of a human being begins with fertilization, a process by which two highly specialized cells, the spermatozoon from the male and the oocyte from the female, unite to give rise to a new organism, the zygote."

In other words, sperm meets egg and new life begins. It's elementary sex ed, just the sort that Planned Parenthood advocates for every pigtailed tot in the schoolyard. And it's disturbing to hear the local head of Planned Parenthood dismiss this scientific fact as some obscure bit of religious dogma.

Of course, such affected ignorance is old news among abortion-rights advocates. In their Roe v. Wade ruling of 1973, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun and his colleagues arrogated to themselves the right to overturn anti-abortion laws across America even as they professed no knowledge of a biological fact the average seventh-grader could recite in his sleep.

"We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins," Blackmun wrote, in a weak attempt to explain why the court had sidestepped the main argument against legalized abortion. "When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer."

Blackmun's muddled statement confused the biological question of when human life begins with the moral and philosophical question of what value that nascent human life possesses. Unwilling to explicitly answer the latter, he disingenuously pleaded ignorance about the former.

Abortion-rights activists have been imitating his sleight of hand ever since. Shifting the abortion debate from scientific facts to philosophical theories has become their favorite rhetorical trick now that advances in ultrasound technology have undercut their earlier denials of the unborn child's humanity.

Anyone who ever has seen a pair of little hands waving at her from the sonogram screen knows that a living human being — not simply a "clump of cells" or "potential life" — inhabits the womb of a pregnant woman. So abortion-rights advocates now argue that what you see on that sonogram is human and alive but not a human person and, therefore, not entitled to rights.

Exactly what makes a human being a person is unclear. Some abortion-rights advocates define personhood by location — as in, outside the womb — or by such qualities as rationality and autonomy. Using that latter definition, Princeton philosopher Peter Singer argues that severely disabled newborns and demented adults do not count as persons while chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans do. Not surprisingly, Singer defends infanticide and euthanasia as well as abortion, claiming that it is illogical to protect human life simply because it is human.

Pro-choice pundits often squirm when Singer starts talking, but he merely follows their favorite new argument to its logical conclusion. If being human is not enough to entitle one to human rights, then the very concept of human rights loses meaning. And all of us — born and unborn, strong and weak, young and old — someday will find ourselves on the wrong end of that cruel measuring stick.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is a St. Louis-based author, former presidential speechwriter and television and radio host of "Faith & Culture" on EWTN. Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com.