The Personhood Argument

Does it or doesn't it work? Is it or isn't it persuasive? Why or why not?

I found myself asking these questions -- I asked them in a very unsophisticated, non-philosophical way, mind you,  being  neither a philosopher nor a sophisticate -- as I read Joe Carter's essay, "Being a Person," up today at First Things. Here's an excerpt:

Clearly, being a member of the human race is not necessary to be considered a person. But should all human beings be considered persons? Historically, the answer has been a resounding “no.” Slaves, women, infants, Jews, and “foreigners” all share a common history of being denied legal or moral standing as persons, despite being recognized as humans. The judgment of recent generations, however, has without exception concluded that denying personhood to these members of the human family is a great moral evil. I have no doubt that future generations will judge ours just as harshly.

Yet while recognition of personhood is the foundation of certain positive rights, it should not be required for a basic negative right—the right not to be deprived of life without due process of law. In other words, people cannot claim a right to kill you simply because they will not recognize you as a person.

Joe's article is worth reading in full for the basic truth towards which it points, too often ignored in the debate over life issues:  while we may quibble over the assignment of personhood, what we cannot ignore is our moral accountability as persons ourselves.  In short, "[m]oral people do not kill innocent human beings," whether we assign full personhood to a life form with human DNA, or we separate personhood from the naked fact of being.

In other words -- though surely the idea repulses us -- we could believe a Latvian, for example, or a fuschia-spotted humanoid from another galaxy, to be not really a person in the same way that we ourselves are, but at the same time intuit that to kill such a being would be a grave wrong, as we intuit that to kill a sentient non-human creature like a whale is not quite the same thing as swatting a fly. The vast majority of white early-20th-century Southerners did not participate in lynchings for much the same reason, though enough of them had no particular quibble with the idea of racial segregation.

I don't mean to advance this as a model of human goodness;  my aim is merely to point out that it is possible to comprehend the wrongness of doing any physical harm to, let alone deliberately causing the death of, a human being whom you do not quite regard as a person like yourself. As moral imperatives go, this one is kind of baseline, on a level with having a pulse;  but if it's the best you have to work with, it will do. And maybe it's true that at the end of the day claims whose warranty is the humanity of the fetus mean less than claims whose warranty is the reminder of our own humanity:  in the mirror, we don't quite yet look like beasts who eat their young.

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Of course, the question inevitably comes up:  What do pro-life people do, other than talk and march and pray the rosary,  to build a viable culture of life?

The answer is that pro-life people do all kinds of things, large and small, public and private, seen and unseen. Here is a very small listing of things that you could do, actively, to contribute to nurture hope for women, children, families, and the culture at large:

Contribute to, or volunteer at, a crisis pregnancy center. You can donate money or baby supplies;  you can volunteer to sort maternity and baby clothes in the clothes closet, or to be trained in a counseling role. You may simply commit to pray regularly for the needs of your local center, which -- I hope I don't actually need to point this out -- is not to do nothing;  it may well be the single most important thing you can do.

Support initiatives like Room at the Inn, which offers housing, counseling, and support -- including opportunities to pursue a college education -- for young mothers and their children, from pregnancy until the child is two.

 Support adoption ministries like CHASK, an acronym meaning "Christian Homes and Special Kids." CHASK is a private adoption network whose purpose is to facilitate adoption of children who would otherwise have been aborted due to prenatal special-needs diagnoses. They also facilitate the re-adoption of children in "disrupted" foreign adoptions and other similarly hard-to-place children. A quick tour of the website indicates that there are more waiting families than waiting children. In a perhaps-related note, I read in the last week or so a blog comment describing the difficulty of adopting a child with Down Syndrome, as a family of the commenter's acquaintance had been trying to do:  though there's been some dispute over the numbers, it would seem that the statistic of a 90% abortion rate for unborn children with Down Syndrome is about right. At any rate, the commenter's friends were finding that there were no infants fitting this description available to adopt, because they were all already dead.

Incidentally, one wants to vet any adoption program carefully before recommending, supporting, or engaging their services. Though CHASK points out that the incidence of adoption scams is pretty negligible in special-needs adoption, I did look for an outside review of their program and found one here. Also, while they specify "Christian" homes, I don't know whether they would consider a Catholic home to be a Christian one. Still, what they do is laudable and needed.

When I have time, I'll create a space in the sidebar to keep these links on the main page. And I'll add to them as I find more listings.