A bicycle is a piece of property that belongs to someone and that someone can use to make their life more fun and convenient. Of course it’s ethical to chain up your own bicycle so it won’t roll away or get stolen, under normal circumstances. There may well be situations when you ought to just let the thief take your bicycle as well, but not for the bicycle’s sake. A bicycle has no dignity. It’s only a thing you can use. Chain it up, put it in the garage, leave it out in the rain, rip it apart and use the parts to repair someone else’s bicycle. That’s okay. Bicycles aren’t persons.
Both a woman and her baby, are persons.
Persons are never property. They’re never things you can simply use, with no remembrance of their dignity, to make your life more fun and convenient. They’re icons to be revered. They are little Christs to be cared for and loved through the the Works of Mercy, whether you think they’re worthy or not. Their personhood makes them worthy, no matter what.
If either a woman or her child were not a person but property like a bicycle, this would be an easy situation. If a woman was a thing you could use like you use a bicycle, we could disregard her autonomy and treat her any way we liked. Use her for fun or for convenience. Use her to get to work on time or to make you look masculine and athletic. Use her as a status symbol. Use her as a surrogate. Force her to have an abortion or lock her up in Solitary so she won’t have one. Hit her when she talks back. Publicly humiliate her when she annoys you. Rape her. Kill her. Chain her up so she wouldn’t wander off or get stolen. People who think women are property have done all this and more. But a woman is a person, so we mustn’t. And every action throughout history that relegates a woman to the position of a bicycle is a grossly unethical action– including when somebody does it to save the life of her child.
If a child were not a person– we’re equally familiar with how that goes. If a child is not a person, it’s not wrong to use her for your own convenience. Let her starve to death because her parents should know better than to have so many kids. Put her in a cage to teach her parents not to be refugees. Put her in an orphanage and don’t bother to see that she’s cared for. Sell her to the next plantation because she’s your slaves’ child and that means she belongs to you. Beat her with a strap to make her shut up. Kill every baby boy under two in all of Bethlehem, to eliminate a rival. Throw them to the crocodiles. Burn them to death with saline injections. Dismember them. This is what happens when people think children are property. But children are persons, so we mustn’t.
We mustn’t treat people as we treat bicycles.
If a person is property, it’s good enough to put a lock on them to stop them from doing something they shouldn’t.
Since a person is a person, we have to treat them like persons. This is true with every human life issue, not just abortion.
And this is why the work of New Pro-Life Movement is valuable. They are trying to look at everything in our culture, to discover what can be done to save lives while respecting human dignity and never using anyone. They view abortion as a symptom– a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad symptom of a society that does not value life. And it is. Abortion is one of the nightmare things that happen when you start treating a person the way you’d treat your bicycle. It’s not the only thing. Doubling down on the dehumanization a culture holds as normal will not make it or any other evil go away– if you try to end abortion by a dehumanizing means, you’re merely playing into the hands of the culture that got us into this mess in the first place.
This is something that holds true whether you’re a blowhard blogger like me, a scholar like Rebecca, or some kind of former politician. Persons are persons, and things are things.
No person is a bicycle.
This is the backbone of what it is to be pro-life.
(image via Pixabay)
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