“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
—Declaration of Independence, 1776
We have established definitively that the unborn “cluster of cells” is human. This can hardly be doubted. And so the pro-choice argument begins to shift from the “cluster of cells” argument to the “they may be a human, but they’re not a person” argument. This argument concedes the humanity of the unborn but denies their personhood, thus laying the groundwork to argue that the Founders never intended for rights to apply to the unborn. When we read the Constitution, the Constitution speaks of persons. The Fifth Amendment, for example, talks about the due process rights of persons. The Fourteenth Amendment speaks of equal protection of the laws, which applies to persons. This creates an opening for abortion advocates to say that human beings are different from persons. While being human is a given, “personhood” is a special status. So, our rights—our right to life, our right to liberty—accrue not to human beings per se but only to persons as understood in the eyes of the law.
In this view, our rights are conferred by the law, which is to say, by the Constitution. And so the law, and indeed society, can determine who has rights and who doesn’t. Rights become something that is granted not by a higher power but by the state. And if the state decides that some people should have rights, then they do; and if the state decides others should not have rights, then they don’t. Pro-choice advocates typically see personhood as something that can be debated, as something that is arbitrary. Some say personhood is achieved at the moment of birth, which is worth thinking about: a human baby spends nine months in the womb as “a cluster of cells” and then poof, he or she is a person at the moment of birth. Others say personhood is achieved when the baby becomes “viable”—a point that is always shifting around on the gestational timetable. Still others say it is a continuum, where the fetus gets more rights as it develops. Under this thinking, a baby who is one month old has less value than a baby who is eight months old because the eight-month-old has been around longer. And so rights, in a sense, drop in wherever it suits the advocate. There is a time when this human becomes a person and attains rights. Before that, they have no rights. Such mental gymnastics are mind-numbing.
Hillary Clinton has said she believes that rights of personhood begin only at birth. Her words when she was running for president in 2016: “The unborn person doesn’t have constitutional rights.”73 Those who are pro-life found this morally wrong and emotionally cold. Even those who are pro-choice and in Hillary’s camp criticized her because she made the unforgivable mistake of referring to the unborn as “a person.” The Left knows that as soon you refer to someone as a person, even by accident because it just slipped out, it becomes problematic to argue that the baby can be lawfully killed at whim. This pro-choice argument denies that there is such a thing as intrinsic or inalienable rights. There are only the rights that are conferred by the state. Roe v. Wade, in a sense, proclaims the non-personhood of the fetus prior to viability.
So let’s consider the question—What is the difference between human beings and persons? If we really think about these two terms, we realize that they are indistinguishable. In other words, there is no difference between a human being and a person. When it comes to your human rights or your basic or natural rights, all human beings are persons, and all persons are human beings. As soon as we differentiate between “humans” and “persons,” we have set the stage for man’s most perverse horrors. This is the justification the Nazis used, claiming that Jews are humans but not persons. This is the justification used for slavery, claiming that blacks are humans but not persons. By saying someone is a human but not a person, you are saying you have the right to do with them as you wish—torturing them, killing them, using their skin for lampshades. And indeed, this is exactly what the Left argues can be done to the human in the womb, airily saying that “it may be a human, but it doesn’t embody personhood.”
Let’s look at the idea of whether personhood is a continuum. Certainly, an eight-month-old baby has a higher sense of awareness and cognition than a one-month-old baby, but does that make the eight-month-old infant more valuable than a one-month-old infant? No, of course not. A twelve-year-old is no more valuable as a person than a nine-year-old. If you have two children—one of them twelve, the other nine—you’re not going to say that the twelve-year-old has a greater right to life than the nine-year-old. That would be absurd.
And, of course, this applies at the other end of life as well. For example, to say that the penalty for killing a seventy-five-year-old should be less than the penalty for killing a fifty-year-old would make no sense. In both cases, it’s murder and the penalty is the same because the crimes are the same. The law doesn’t put a different value on the life you took based on age or gender, but what the law does take into account is whether the murder was premeditated or accidental, and so on. The crime is the taking of innocent human life. Human lives have equal value when you are talking about murder.
To be sure, some types of rights depend on age and maturity, which is to say that there is legal acknowledgment of the continuum idea. Consider, for example, the matter of driving. A ten-year-old does not have the authority to drive, but a sixteen-year-old who has passed the driving test can. A ten-year-old cannot vote, but an eighteen-year-old can. It isn’t hard to understand that as we reach certain points of maturity, we are eligible to partake in certain activities that we were not eligible to do at an earlier stage of our lives.
What we’re talking about here is an important distinction between natural rights on the one hand and civil rights on the other. Civil rights, of course, are rights conferred by the state. But here I want to focus on natural rights, which are different from civil rights. Natural rights are rights that we have by virtue of being human; just by virtue of being a person. These are rights that we have, you may say, prior to being part of a civil community. These are rights that we have, as the early modern philosophers used to say, in the state of nature. That’s why the Declaration of Independence calls these rights—the right to life, the right to liberty, and the right to the pursuit of happiness—inalienable. They’re inalienable in the sense that we can’t sell them or barter them away, even if we wanted to. America’s very foundation is rooted in these inalienable rights.
Let’s turn to the Founders for a moment to see where they believed our rights come from. Interestingly, Thomas Jefferson, who was a man of the Enlightenment and one of the least religious of the Founders, says that our rights come from our Creator. Our rights, in other words, come from our being God’s anointed creation and superior to all other living creatures. It seems that one could dismiss this argument today as being somewhat antiquated, but it’s pretty hard to think of where else such profound rights come from. In my view, what distinguishes human beings from other animals is that we are moral creatures.
We are creatures that have a moral status different from other animals. Natural rights, for the Founders, are the rights that you are born with. Natural rights and human rights are also a universal aspiration that transcend the whims of governments constructed by men. Consider, for example, the list of human rights listed in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. One of these is the right, for example, not to be tortured. Another is the right, as a civilian, not to be targeted in war. Governments may or may not respect or recognize these rights, but the point of the UN declaration is that these rights exist, and to violate them is to commit a high crime against human rights.
Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher who conceived of a virtually all-powerful state, says that we turn over our rights to the state when we enter a social compact. But, he argues, we only owe allegiance to the state when it protects our life and safety. And if the state doesn’t give us the right to life, then we have every cause to rebel and resist. In other words, we confer some of our rights to the state in exchange for protection of life, but when the protection is withheld or denied, then the deal is off. The right to life is the fundamental right. It is the right that ultimately makes all other rights possible. Without it, we have nothing. It is the most natural of natural rights, the most human of human rights.
These reasons are why we speak of the Right-to-Life movement. It is a movement that is fighting for the most basic right of all—life.
In the smoke-and-mirrors debate over whether a baby in the womb is a person or a human, the only truly important issue is obscured. What matters is that a baby—surely a human and surely a person—can be deprived under our laws of his or her right to life. It is a moral abomination before God and all civilized men and women.
Trying to distinguish a human from a person is a recipe for tyranny, enslavement, and totalitarianism. We are human beings, and we are also persons. The unborn are human beings and also persons. Their worth, like our worth, does not come from society or the law or the state. They are God’s littlest creatures and deserve the full protection of our nation.