A Person Is a Person No Matter How Small
On March 15, 2008 the creators of Ice Age will release the new animated movie, Horton Hears a Who! based on Dr. Seuss’s book by the same title.
In the movie Horton, who is an elephant, discovers a tiny microscopic world on a speck of dust when he hears the citizens there crying out for help. The other animals in Horton’s world do not believe that the Whos of the city of Who-ville really exist because they cannot see or hear these people. When the Whos ask for Horton to protect them, he commits himself to saving the citizens of Who-ville and he adopts the motto, “a person is a person no matter how small.”
The other animals harass and even imprison Horton, but in the end Horton saves the citizens of Who-ville by helping them let the others know that they are there and they are real.
While this book was not written to address the life of a baby in the womb, the preborn are often in this same predicament. They are there and they are real, but over the years people have been convinced, because they could not see them that they were not really human beings.
But with today’s medical technology we can see the baby in the womb and we know that he or she (there sex is determined at conception) is there and that he or she is not simply “fetal tissue” or a “product of conception.” We also know today that at conception a genetically unique and independent human life begins. By independent I mean that the child is not a part of the woman’s body, but a separate and distinct human being growing and developing within her.
Some would argue that even though the baby is a human life, he or she is not a person. But for those who make this argument there is no way that they can objectively deny that the baby is not a person at any point in the child’s development which begins at conception.
To deny personhood at some point in the child’s development is essentially arbitrary. The viability of a life outside of the womb is constantly changing as medical technology advances. Additionally new born babies are also dependent upon others for their survival. And to say that an individual must have a certain level of cognitive development to be a person is also dangerous and arbitrary. Are those who have a higher I.Q. more human than those with a lower I.Q.?
When a person denies that personhood begins at conception (they cannot deny that life begins at conception) and advocates for abortion or aborts the life of a child in the womb, they themselves cannot know for certain whether or not a human person is being destroyed. They are in essence declaring that the value of choice is a higher value than the value of life, and therefore it is justifiable to destroy a child in the womb even if he or she really is a person.
I appeal to those who advocate for abortion, since you cannot objectively be sure of when personhood begins, “If you must err, err on the side of life.”