Equal Rights for All Human Beings

(Excerpted from Christopher Kaczor in First Things August 2011)

In most states, young people can drive a car at sixteen. At 18, they can vote and serve in the military. At 21, they can drink alcohol. At 25, they can serve in the House of Representatives; at 30, in the Senate, and, at 35, as President of the United States. We gain rights as we age. Some hold that the unborn also gains rights as he ages in the uterus. They believe that an unborn person has fewer rights at the time of conception than he has just before birth. Many Pro-Life people like to adopt this attitude. This attitude is called the “gradualist attitude,” because it gradually assigns the right to life to the unborn as he/she ages.

It should be recognized that the gradualist attitude calls into question one of the most fundamental principles of democratic society: the basic equality of all human beings. The Nazi’s claimed that inequality when they considered Jews less than human. Thus, it can be seen that the gradualist attitude is a dangerous one for civilized society.

The rights listed in the first paragraph depend upon one’s ability to perform responsibly; and those things advance as one ages. The right to life, however, does not depend upon maturing intellectual and physical abilities. It is a right that is conferred simply on the basis that every living human being has the innate right to live, regardless of his/her level of dependency or his/her ability to feel pain (There are many other criteria that have been proposed by those eager to assign non-human status to early unborn babies.)

The gradualist viewpoint appeals to some because they think it is a view of moderation, which seems desirable to them. Aristotle pointed out centuries ago, however, that not everything admits of a virtuous mean—that is, moderation in the form of compromise between two radically different viewpoints is often not virtuous but vicious. As an example, the difference between killing 100 people and killing no people cannot be resolved by taking a “moderate” viewpoint and killing only 50 people. The moderation of the gradualist view is no evidence of its truth.

This is the reason that Pro-Lifers cannot compromise with gradualists or those who would assign life rights to some unborn babies and not others. An aborted baby is just as dead if it is killed at an early stage of fetal life as if it were killed later in its development.

Human life begins when the human genome is completed at conception by the23 chromosomes from the mother and 23 from the father, and that completed genome is encapsulated within a bath of cytoplasm and a cell membrane. That fertilized ovum only needs nutrition, oxygen, and time to become a fully developed human being. He/she is, indeed, a human being despite his/her size, level of development, and sentience.