Wonderful baby, living on love, the Sandman says maybe he'll take you above. Up where the girls fly on ribbons and bows, where babies float by, just counting their toes. We'll build perhaps we should all brush up on arguments for why we're opposed to abortion

on demand.

This article in The New York Times by Legal Scholar Erica Bashyoshi argues that it's the personhood of the fetus that is most important. Do you think that's the main issue? Well, I think the way that she defines the personhood of the fetus does make this the issue. She is equating here persons with human beings because that's the way the US Constitution uses the expression. And so she's not making a philosophical point about when does a human being count as the person, equating human beings with persons.

And in that case, I think it is the humanity of the fetus that is the really key question here. She says, now that the Supreme Court has returned the issue of abortion to legislatures, pro livers will work to ensure that unborn children in every jurisdiction are protected by law. Though individual states can and already have sought to protect the most vulnerable human beings through ordinary legislation, constitutional protection of unborn children as equal persons under the law remains the movement's ultimate if elusive goal. And she continues, making this constitutional case will require rejecting the concept that a rights-bearing person is fundamentally self-owning and autonomous. Indeed, it is precisely the unborn child's state of existential dependence upon his mother, not his autonomy, that makes it especially entitled to care, nurture, and legal protection too, to exclude some human beings from the laws protection because of their size, location, and state of dependency, and post-row, whichever jurisdiction their mother happens to be in, seems to pro-lifers an egregious human rights violation. Just the kind we believe the 14th Amendment was meant to prevent." So Bill, she's saying that it's not necessarily the unborn child's autonomy that is an issue, but the unborn child's utter dependency on its mother that most entitles it to care and protection. Further down she says, my fellow pro-lifers and I will also need to make the case to expect it mothers and fathers too, that their unborn children are, like the rest of us, dependent and needy persons, not expendable property in court. I think this is a really interesting emphasis by this author. She's saying it's not simply the autonomy of the fetus that is at stake here. Certainly that is important. is biomedical nonsense to say that the fetus that is at stake here. Certainly that is important. It is biomedical nonsense to say that the fetus is part of the woman's body. Rather, this is an autonomous human organism growing inside the mother's uterus, much like a human being that's hooked up to a life support system. The baby, as it develops, is hooked up to the mother as a sort of life support system. And so even though it is autonomous, in the sense that it is an individual human being in its own right, nevertheless, as she says, it's not independent on the contrary. It is existentially dependent upon the mother. And that makes it especially entitled to care and nurture and legal protection. It's not just its autonomy, but its vulnerability and its dependency that it entitles it to such care and protection. I remember in my civics class as a boy, we learned that Abraham Lincoln said that it was the purpose of government to protect those who cannot protect themselves. And when When you think about it, there is no one that is more helpless, more defenseless than a child in utero, utterly dependent upon the mother and us for care and legal protection. And so I think she's quite right in emphasizing this existential dependence as a very important factor in why the developing fetus is entitled to such care and protection. And the article continues, including, in the way Americans have argued about abortion over the decades a standoff exists between the rights bearing autonomous person who as the dobs decent argues owns her own pregnant body versus the fetus that she might view as impinging on that autonomy Americans have an understanding of property rights deriving from the philosophy of John Locke, as absolute and unlimited. Today, leftist reject this view of property rights as applied to the economy, yet paradoxically embrace it as applied to a pregnant woman and her unborn child. Indeed, explicitly employing the terms of American property law, abortion

rights supporters often liken the unwelcome fetus to a trespasser or invader, and the welcome one to an invited guest. The right to keep another off one's property, employing the use of force as necessary is basic to the lock-inspired property rights paradigm in the United States. End of quote. Bill, it also occurred to me that leftist are in favor of mandatory vaccinations, but then will argue, my body, my choice when it comes to abortion on demand. Interesting, isn't it? As this author points out, how the language of property rights is applied by abortion proponents to a woman and her body, and the fetus then regarded as part of her body, and therefore her property to dispose of as she wishes. And I think of course that's just nonsense that the fetus is not to be regarded as mere property. It is an autonomous human being invested within intrinsic value and therefore basic human rights. And I think in overturning Roe v. Wade, the court acted in a court with the president's set when they court overturned the Dred Scott decision, which also treated a certain class of human beings, namely blacks in America, as mere property, mere chattel, and therefore within the rights of their owners and not fully human. And so again, the the Roe v. Wade decision had the practice of dehumanizing a whole category of human beings and placing them in the realm of mere property, which is, I think, completely misguided. Continuing the article, in the years before Rho, the pro-life case was more straightforward. As the historian Daniel Williams has shown in his Magisterial Defenders of the Unborn, the pro-life movement in the late 1960s originated as a campaign promoting human rights. The message was that every human being has a right to life by virtue of being human. Human life, human being, and human person were used interchangeably among pro-lifers. Indeed, the equivalence between a human being and a human person, historically speaking, has won scholarly proponents of fetal personhood lean on to defend their original constitutional claims that person in the 14th amendment includes unborn human beings. Bill, are we seeing a need for both a philosophical definition and a legal definition of personhood? Well, I think there's no doubt that both of these issues are going to need to be discussed, but she's quite right in saying that the pro-life movement was treating human life, human being, human person as interchangeable terms. And so what was critical here and is critical, I think, is the humanity of the developing fetus. Is this a human being? And it seems to me that that's just indisputable. Biometically, this is not a canine embryo, not a feline embryo, not a bovine embryo. It is a human embryo and a human fetus. And then a human child. So I don't see any reason to try to make this distinction between human rights and person rights. Though philosophically, I do think there's an issue to be discussed here. The article continues, but with the 14th Amendment jurisprudence of Ro and especially the 1992 Planned Bury to Ed versus Casey ruling, came the focus on the personal autonomy of women seeking abortions, which implicitly demoted the legal status of their unborn children. Women's autonomy, or absolute self-ownership, required the right to exclude her child from her body. Furthermore, Casey claimed, as the descent in Dobbs underscores, that such autonomy was necessary for women's equal participation in economic and social life. And Bill just to summarize the article, she siced the 18th century philosopher Mary Wollstone craft, author of, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She sought civil and political rights for women, so they might better fulfill their responsibility to others. As Wollstonecraft reason, both men and women have moral responsibilities to others, and should be free to fulfill those responsibilities. He said, responsibility is for a child, does not begin when the child is born, but when he or she was still developing in the mother's womb, this makes the my body my choice lingo sound rather selfish, doesn't it? Oh, I think it certainly does, and I love the way she associates this with thinking of one's body in terms of property rights. And when she says that the pro-abortion movement wanted the woman to have the right to exclude the developing fetus from her body, what she really means is the right to expel that fetus from her body to exterminate it. But this is based upon the idea that it isn't a sense included in her body as part of her property. And therefore is at her disposal to treat as she wishes. So along with emphasizing the autonomy of women, there needs to be an equal emphasis upon the autonomy of the developing fetus as a human being in its own right, invested with intrinsic moral value, and therefore with fundamental human rights. As I say, we need to distinguish between autonomy and independence. The fetus is an autonomous human being, but it is existentially dependent upon the mother as a life support system. And therefore, it's the most vulnerable in our society entitled to the care and nurture and protection of others. Here's how the article concludes. Without robust societal support of pregnant women and child-bearing families, too many women will be left to regard their unborn children as trespassers on their already taxed lives rather than unbidden gifts that open you horizons to them. These women need societies utmost assistance, not abortion or scorn. End of quote. Summary Bill, and then we'll quickly look at some letters to the editor that are in response to this article. I think what she's emphasizing here is that a consistent pro-life response is not simply anti-abortion. It is pro-mother, pro-child, and wants to provide the kind of care and services that these young mothers need to carry their child to term and to raise it or to offered for for adoption. And certainly a consistent pro-life position will be one that is committed to the nurture and care of the mother and child alike. Bill, we'll look at three letters in response written to the New York Times in response to this article. To the editor, I must challenge Miss Bashyoshi's insistence on referring to an embryo or fetus as an unborn child. Pregnancy begins with a small cluster of undifferentiated cells that are not, in fact, a child. The anti-choice movement calls it a child because it is essential to their argument. But calling it so does not make it so. At term, that small cluster has definitely grown into an unborn child. Somewhere on the continuum of fetal development, it is reasonable to say it has become a person. That moment of personhood is perhaps difficult to define, but Ro at least may the effort. Given the enormous consequences to the mother, it is important that we give her the right to choose her own well-being for some period of time, over that which is not yet an unborn child. Bill? Well, he's using the word child here to indicate a stage of human development, we might differentiate between, for example, a baby, a child, an adolescent, and an adult. And certainly, these are different stages, a child is not an adult, an adolescent is not an infant. But nevertheless, all of these are stages of human development. And if I'm right, then this individual in its early stages of development, as a fetus, which simply means a little one, or as an embryo, are human beings, and therefore have intrinsic moral value, just because a human being is not in the child stage does not mean that it is no longer a human being, and therefore no longer valuable. But in any case, the writer of this letter does recognize that at some point during the pregnancy, we are dealing with an unborn child. Photography in utero has revealed the unbelievable development of these little ones with their tiny fingers and toes, their facial expressions, even sucking on their thumbs, it's just impossible, I think, to deny that we're dealing here with human beings, whether you want to call it a child or not is simply simply a matter of where you make the division of the stages. And this author of this letter doesn't support abortion on demand. He wants to say that at some point, we are dealing with a human child and that therefore it would be immoral to terminate its existence. And so he has already, I think, abandoned the position under Roe v. Wade and Casey versus Planned Parenthood, which allowed abortion right up until the moment of birth. Next letter says to the editor, here's a question for Erica Bashyoshi, you are a nurse in a hospital, and the fire alarm goes off, on the corridor to the right is an incubator with five embryos, on the corridor to the left is a room with a weak old child. You only have time to go down one quarter, which do you choose? If you believe that we attain personhood at the moment of conception, then of course you elect to save the embryos. But would you? This is a typical moral dilemma that you will find in textbooks in ethics courses. And these are sort of stock in trade, for example, whom do you kick out of the lifeboat or who should be

expected to leave the lifeboat if it only has room for a certain number of people? Someone has to be given up or all will perish. And sometimes these kind of moral dilemmas occur in real life, for example, in the aftermath of a mass shooting or terrorist attack, first responders have to carry out triage on the victims to determine which ones to give their medical attention to because they cannot attend to them all. There are just too many. And so they will try to determine which of the victims that are dying have the best

chance. attend to them all. There are just too many. And so they will try to determine which of the victims that are dying have the best chance of survival. And they will actually pass over the others in order to provide medical attention to those victims that have the best chance of being saved. And they let the others die. So these kinds of moral dilemmas are very real. Now the fact that these first responders overlook some of the victims and leave them to die doesn't imply that they're non-human, does it? It's just saying that there are different priorities that are occasioned by which ones, for example, have the better chance at survival. And so in the case at hand here, if the one room has a child who is already a weak old and is therefore actualized considerably its human potential, that child is quite different from embryos which have not yet actualized their human potential. And one might well feel that it is more important to save the more fully actualized human being, or that one has a moral obligation toward that more fully actualized human being than toward the embryos. But notice that doesn't imply that the embryos are therefore not human beings, that they're just mere trash to be discarded at will. And so this argument doesn't really do anything to show that developing embryos or fetuses are not human beings and therefore are not valuable and worthy of protection. I put to him a different question, suppose that you're a nurse, and the opposite the room where the we call child is, there's a lab containing 20 lab rats, and you only have time to save either the lab rats or the embryos. Which one will you pick? Well, I think you would probably pick the embryos because the lab rats are non-human. And in that sense you see that gives you a clear differentiation between the child and non-human animals, but in the case of the embryos, these are human embryos. These are human beings. And so that doesn't apply. Rather you will apply different moral guidelines to make the choice. Much as those first responders do in performing selective triage without implying that those who are left to die are not human. And then this letter, I did only shake my head when I read this essay by the conservative Catholic legal scholar, Erica Bashyoshi, about 11.6 million children, the majority children of color, live in poverty. At the same time, as many as 13 million children live in food insecure homes, that is, they and the other members of the family don't have enough to eat each day. These are living, breathing children with hopes, dreams, and pressing daily needs. I can only wonder how and God's name any rational caring person can spend the days stewing about the rights of the unborn when already there are for too many hungry, needy children in the United States, let alone in this world. Bill, it just baffles me how any rational caring person can think that the solution to children living in poverty is to kill them, to exterminate them before they are born, so is to reduce the amount of living in poverty. That seems to be an absolutely mad way of moral priorities. rather surely the answer is to help those in poverty, but without neglecting to provide protections for the unborn children from wanton extermination. So, abortion should never be used as an anti-poverty program. Indeed, he mentions the children of color. In one sense, abortion is terribly racist in targeting the black population in the United States far more than, say, the white or Asian population. It could be seen as a means of racial control. So don't talk to us

about using abortion to try to solve problems of poverty and what that is

that is an utterly perverse way of moral priorities. Thank you.