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

Only God knows how deeply and mysteriously the creation of personhood is woven into the making of the body…The destruction of conceived human life – whether embryonic, fetal, or viable – is an assault on the unique person-forming work of God.

Dr. John Piper

The evidence that human life begins at conception, not at birth is so overwhelming that even the “pro-choice” camp has had to largely accept this medical fact.  To be sure, there are still abortion advocates who try to argue that human life does not begin until birth but the number is dwindling - largely because the medical data now available simply does not support this reckless claim.  Instead defenders of this heinous “medical” practice have now abandoned a scientific defense and have turned to philosophy to support its continuation.  Ever so deftly, abortion supporters have shifted the debate from when human life biologically begins to what the definition of a person is.  

Dr. Bernard Nathanson, the co-founder of NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League) and abortion rights pioneer turned pro-life activist, addresses the reason why pro-choice advocates had to change the focus of the controversy.  In his book, The Hand of God, he writes:

The crux of the issue as defined by most pro-abortion theorists is whether the embryo, or later the fetus, is to be considered a ‘person’.  It is crucial for them to move the debate onto that ground because there is simply no doubt that even the early embryo is a human being.  All its genetic coding and all its features are indisputably human. As to being there is no doubt that it exists, is alive, is self-directed, and is not the same being as its mother – and is therefore a unified whole…So personhood must be made critical if abortion is to be moral.

Abortion supporters know that if they are successful in endowing “personhood” on a more exclusive group than just all human biological life, they will have succeeded in making abortion a moral and just practice in the public eye.

Of course, philosophy itself cannot agree on a definition of what constitutes “personhood”.  Several philosophers have weighed in on the matter with the abortion issue in mind.  Bonnie Steinbock, author of Life Before Birth: The Moral and Legal Status of Embryos and Fetuses, subscribes to the “interest” view.  This is the belief that the possession of interests is necessary for attaining a moral status.  Basically, beings have rights who have moral status.  Michael Tooley, a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, believes there are no less than fourteen different attributes a being must possess before being crowned with “personhood”. Among these characteristics are the ability to problem solve, the ability to interact with others, and the property of being a continuing conscious self.   This is a rather stringent test for “personhood” - I certainly hope I’m not tested early in the morning!  Needless to say, there is no way my month-old infant son could pass this test either.  I wonder if Professor Tooley would support infanticide too.

 I do not pretend for a second to possess the philosophical credentials necessary to debate these ideas.  I do, however, know a little something about history and it is interesting to note that this is not the first time a society has tried to exclude certain human life from a more exclusive definition of “personhood”.  Let’s see where this set of ideas has led other societies in the past and decide for ourselves whether we want to follow that same slippery path.

Unfortunately, we don’t have to look far as our own country’s past can attest. In 1857, just three years before the Civil War, the Supreme Court ruled in the infamous Dred Scott case that:

... a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves...were not intended to be included under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can, therefore, claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.

Here the Supreme Court ruled that people of another race did not qualify as “citizens” and therefore were not entitled to the rights others were granted.  Slavery was a despicable practice which was constantly defended with the argument that black people were not fully people.  The language used in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal, sounds eerily similar:

The word 'person,' as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.... [T]he unborn have never been recognized in the law as persons in the whole sense.

Here we see that more than a hundred years after Dred Scott, the same argument was used to strip another class of people, the unborn, of their inalienable rights.  In the first case, the law allowed certain people (“negroes”) to be enslaved and, here, in the second case, the law allows for another group (the unborn) to be killed outright.  This is a logical progression of events once the definition of “person” becomes arbitrary or capricious.

Of course, there is an even more chilling example of where this ideology of a more exclusive “personhood” was put into practice.  The Holocaust is a well-established fact.  Unless you’re an Iranian dictator or member of a racial supremacy group, you probably understand that during World War II Hitler ordered the mass executions of over twelve million minorities, six million of which were Jews.  What is not as well-known is that Nazi Germany used this same reasoning to murder hundreds of thousands of medical patients before it ever turned its attention to the Jews and other ethnic groups.

Hugh Gallagher, a paraplegic and author of By Trust Betrayed, writes that between two and three hundred thousand disabled German citizens were granted “final medical assistance” because their use to society had run out.  The physician-initiated program started off slowly but picked up steam as it progressed. Gallagher states, “When they started the program, they killed patients on a one-by-one basis, and then it began to accelerate, until at the end, they were clearing out whole wards of hospitals.”  Gallagher goes on to state that it was with this program started by the medical community (not by Hitler) that the German government perfected the killing techniques they would later use on the Jews (i.e. gas chambers, etc.).

Dr. D. James Kennedy in his book, Lord of All, emphasizes that this practice “did not actually begin with the Nazis.  It was discussed by doctors and philosophers all over the Western world the previous half century.” It was just that the Nazi government was the first to incorporate these ideas into practice. C. Everett Koop, the former U.S Surgeon General wrote in Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation, “…when the first 273,000 German aged, infirm, and retarded were killed in gas chambers, there was no outcry from that medical profession either, and it was not far from there to Auschwitz.”  Another logical progression, if you will.

After these barbaric Hegelian medical practices were in place (it is also interesting to note that abortion was legal in Germany during this time), the horrible truth did not register with the German people when Hitler declared the Jews were not a human race in 1923 and when Germany’s highest court failed to recognize Jews in the full legal sense as a person in 1936. After all, the “undesirable” in that country were already being treated as less than human.  Once that happens, it’s merely a majority decision to determine whom the desirable and undesirable persons are, with the undesirable members then being casually discarded when they become a nuisance to the desirable.

See, I believe all men are equal because the Scriptures state we are all created in the image of God (Gen. 1:27).  This is a theme that runs through the course of the Bible.  In Job 31: 13-15, Job is arguing that he has always treated his servants properly as other individuals even though it was common for bondmen and bondwomen in those days to be treated as property without rights.  How does he support his treatment of them as fully people? The passage states:

If I have despised the cause of my male or female servant When they complained against me, What then shall I do when God rises up?  When he punishes, how shall I answer Him?  Did not He who made me in the womb make them?  Did not the same one fashion us in the womb?

He justifies his treatment of his servants by saying they were both created by the same God!  Dr. John Piper, senior minister of Bethlehem Baptist Church and former Professor of Biblical Studies at Bethel College, writes on this text in his book, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals:

So both Psalm 139 and Job 31 emphasize God as the primary workman – nurturer, fashioner, knitter, Creator – in this time of gestation.  Why is that important?  It’s important because God is the only one who can create personhood. Mothers and fathers can contribute some impersonal egg and some impersonal sperm, but only God creates independent personhood.  So when the Scripture emphasizes that God is the main nurturer and shaper in the womb, it is stressing that that what is happening in the womb is the unique work of God, namely, the making of a person.  From the Biblical point of view gestation is the unique work of God fashioning personhood.

Galatians 3:26-29, further emphasizes that all who place their faith in Jesus Christ are accepted equally before the throne of God.  The verses state:

For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus.  For as many of you as were baptized into Christ  have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.

I hope the lesson from history is clear. The world’s vision of life leads to an exclusive definition of personhood.  Inevitably, every time a society has assumed the power to judge which life is worthy of living and which life is not, great evil has been the result and life and liberty have always been the first casualties.  The Biblical view of life is that it’s a precious gift from God and it is not for mankind to deem any life unworthy – whether it is the lame, sick, elderly, a minority race, or the unborn. That life is an unalienable right for us all. Which view do you subscribe to?