Personhood and Death Certificates
This past week was the March For Life in Washington DC, so I thought I’d do a post on the subject of abortion…
A couple of weeks ago, I published a brief post a blog post related to Martin Luther King. Earlier in the week, I had been speaking to someone on Facebook about abortion. The pro-choice advocate had been arguing against any legal restrictions against abortion. He said that ethical behaviour isn’t brought about by the law, it only cultivates fear of being caught. I responded with a quotation from Dr. King, to show why laws which protect people are necessary:
The other day I was looking at the management panel for the Restless Pilgrim Facebook Page and noticed that someone had left a response:
“A clump of cells is not a person”
Facebook user
Personhood
This Facebook user was an acquaintance of mine and I knew that he had a daughter, so I asked him a question, “When did your daughter become a person?”
He responded by saying that this happened at 18-weeks gestation and vociferously asserted that he’s consistent in his morality.
Naturally, my response was “Why at 18-weeks?” What was it about his daughter such that, at 18-weeks she suddenly became a person? I suspected how he might reply to this, but his response really surprised me…
He said that his daughter became a person at 18-weeks because the majority of miscarriages happen prior to this point. This is a strange reply because it’s a non sequitur (Latin for “it does not follow”). There is no connection between someone dying at a particular age and personhood. People die at many different stages in life, but just because you’re more likely to die by a particular age, doesn’t mean that you are robbed of personhood beforehand.
I asked for the connection between personhood and likelihood of death and, needless to say, he couldn’t offer any. In fact, he backed away and said that he wasn’t really offering an argument! If so, why then respond to my question? He might as well have just said “I believe this because I believe this”. He can hold to that reasoning if he likes, but it’s worth pointing out that holding this kind of tautological position means that the person effectively excludes themselves from rational discourse, being unable to offer evidence or logic for asserted positions.
Death Certificate
The conversation then took another strange turn. Earlier in our exchanged I had said spoken about the death of the child in a miscarriage. My interlocutor declared that miscarriages aren’t deaths as there isn’t a death certificate issued!
I thought his argument about personhood was bad, but this was even worse! I pointed out that death is a biological reality, regardless of whether or not the government decides to track it and issue a piece of paper confirming it.
As far as I can tell, the English government only began issuing death certificates after 1st July, 1837. Does that mean that nobody died prior to this date?! When the Nazi death camps were gassing Jews, did they not actually die since certificates weren’t issued? The Sentinelese are the world’s most isolated tribe, living on one of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean. They live and die without a government issuing a piece of paper.
Miscarriage is death, abortion is death. The former is due to natural causes, the latter by design.
Misrepresentation
In response, he called me names. He wrote some sentences with grammar which defied parsing. He then told a lie, saying that I had previously said that contraception is abortion. I asked him which was more likely:
- That I had said contraception is abortion
- That he had misread or misunderstood something that I had said. After all, between the two of us, my position is crystal clear. Once conception has taken place, you have a new human person in existence. Since contraception stops conception taking place, there wouldn’t be a human being there to kill in the first place.
Back to definitions
I tried to take him back to the original question, but he wouldn’t have it. I then asked a new question. I asked him to define “person”. After all, if he believed that a 17-week fetus isn’t a person, he must have some idea for what he means by “person”. He didn’t respond. Twelve hours later he still hadn’t responded and then he purged the thread.
This exchange taught me an important lesson. Next time I will ask that question first of all.