There’s a saying that “the law is a teacher.” That teacher is actively instructing every single person in our society what is good and what is bad, how to live their daily lives, how to make decisions, and how to interact with each other.
So, when this teacher becomes contradictory and confused about something as central as what it means to be a person, you can be sure that many in our society will be confused as well.
It’s easy to point to obvious examples of this confusion, such as recent attempts by some states to recognize animals as people. It’s getting even more confused in foreign countries. Take, for example, last month’s decision by the Bangladesh Supreme Court to give rivers rights akin to a human’s. And too many American courts are confused about what it means to be a person, particularly when the person in question is an unborn child.
For those who are pro-life, the understanding of personhood is simple and uncomplicated: Every single human being, from the moment of conception, is a person. He or she is entitled to the same rights and protections as the rest of us. You acquire personhood right alongside your unique genetic code: It’s woven into you from the first moment you exist.
Our country’s laws are nowhere near that straightforward. In every state, a baby can legally be killed in her mother’s womb — in some states, right up to the very instant of birth. But at the same time, 38 states protect unborn babies’ lives with fetal homicide laws. Twenty-eight of those laws protect babies from the moment of conception. And 41 states have wrongful death laws that protect an unborn child. Unborn children even have inheritance rights. The fact is, abortion is the only context in which the unborn child is not legally recognized and protected.
You might think our Constitution has settled the question of personhood, but it hasn’t. The one time personhood was explicitly addressed in the Constitution, our founders got it wrong. And as a result, the practice of slavery marred our nation for nearly another century.
The American Constitution diminished and effectively denied the personhood of black Americans. This was reflected in the compromise by which slaves were counted as three-fifths of a whole person when determining the apportionment of representatives to the states. This disassociation of personhood from its true meaning was an abject moral failure that ruined untold lives and led to a civil war that nearly destroyed the nation. Its ugly echoes of racism still haunt our nation today.
This failure did not need to happen. Writing a century before the Civil War, legal scholar William Blackstone gave a scientific and morally defensible definition of legal personhood based on the limited science of his day and its now-outdated idea of “quickening.” He wrote that that “Life is the immediate gift of God, a right inherent by nature in every individual; and it begins in contemplation of law as soon as an infant is able to stir in the mother’s womb.”
Today, our advancing scientific knowledge makes clear that a new, unique human comes into being at the very moment of conception.
Abolitionists believed that all people — regardless of race — were equal. Personhood is concerned with humanity, not race, not age, not status. Humanity. As foundational as our Constitution is, it is not an infallible document.
As the debate over protecting the dignity of all human life escalates and courts still struggle to make sense of the corrupt Roe v. Wade decision, we would do well to look back at many abolitionists and their principled association of personhood with humanity. Attempts to define personhood any other way — by age, ability, race, or sex — are both contradictory and unjust. In the same way that a distorted understanding of personhood was once used to justify slavery, today it is being used to justify infanticide and abortion while allowing human rights for animals.
When the law failed to recognize full legal personhood for slaves, it cost America countless lives — over 600,000 in the Civil War alone — and countless deaths under the thumbs of slave masters. The denial of the personhood of the unborn has cost us almost 62 million lives.
It is time to stop compromising on personhood and recognize that every human life is a whole human person from the very moment of conception. Roe and its tragic legacy of abortion on demand must go. States must be free to defend precious human life from the hands of the abortionist — just as so many states already protect these babies from the hands of murderers.
Kristen Waggoner is the senior vice president of the U.S. legal division for Alliance Defending Freedom. Follow her on Twitter @KWaggonerADF and follow ADF @AllianceDefends.
