As an unborn baby, do I have rights? I think so. I have the right to be born. I had the right to be born. I was a human, as yet unborn, from the minute of copulation. As everybody else, I am the result of an orgasm. I thank my mother for not killing me after creating me but before seeing daylight.
If you terminate me one day before birth, it is legal. If I die at birth, I am stillborn and may recieve a funeral and burial place. If I am killed a day after birth, the killer goes to jail. Either of the three, I am dead and would not be able to recieve this plea.
God and nature intended that gametes should meet through a meeting of male and female. It is why there are genders. The union produces a new human in a proces that starts at copulation. I start my growth into an adult at copulation.
Honduras: “Every human being should have the right to life and human dignity.” But when does the human being become a human being? Is the unborn not a human being? But as soon as it reaches daylight, it becomes a human being? Does an early born baby have more rights than an unborn baby conceived on the same day? In reality, the life of the foetus should be protected from the moment of conception. In some jurisdictions, The unborn is considered as born for “all rights accorded within the limits established by law”. (Republic of Honduras.) And thus the ‘life’ of a person begins at conception. We have a ‘Birthday’ each year – but not a ‘Conception Day’. (What a fuck-up that would be!) We accept the right of parents to reproduce, although we get a bit ‘iffy’ if one group develops a scheme to ‘outbreed’ our breed. But we don’t give the same rights to sperm. Made famous by those screaming: “Every sperm is precious”. We produce millions of sperm because we recognize the ‘hit and miss’ nature of sexual reproduction. But once a girl is pregnant, she is afforded special attention in our communities. The Republic of the Phillipines officially records is as:
The State recognizes the sanctity of family life and shall protect and strengthen the family as a basic autonomous social institution. It shall equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception.
“Philippines’s Constitution of 1987” Section 12
Zambia states:
No person shall deprive an unborn child of life by termination of pregnancy except in accordance with the conditions laid down by an Act of Parliament for that purpose.
The abortion argument assumes that the unborn has no rights. Who then can authorize the removal of the unborn child. In an abortion, they are clearly removing something that will become a human. They are not trimming fingernails or trimming rolls of fat from the overweight. If, for example, as we hear of the communists in China, the state decides that you should not have a baby and aborts your baby against your will. Yet, so many argue for Marxism. Goodbye baby. Under Marxism, you might as well consider yourself the property of the state. If the unborn is falls into the category: “My body – my choice”. With the inference that the foetus is part of the body, and the removal does not alter the female body, then the foetus is not truly part of the female body or something would fail to function without that part of the body.
As a community where we all inter-relate, we already have measures in place to represent the interests of the unborn. We demand that the mother restrain herself in many ways including restraint from alcohol and many other items. We wish to protect the unborn and society from foetal alcohol syndrome.
Still looking after rights of humans, in South Africa it is legal to perform an abortion if a pregnancy may endanger the life or health of the mother, including her mental health, or there is risk of an abnormal fetus, or in case of rape or incest.
We accept the fundamental right of human beings to reproduce. It is part of nature. We also, as a community, take the responsibility for providing for the child and the family. And thus, reproduction is not an unrelated right to the community’s responsibility to provide for the child and the family. If, for example, all the congenitally blind people have a new sport of breeding many offspring in a society that shows certain restraint in family size, we have a dire situation where there might be large numbers of congenitally blind at birth. So the right to reproduce is not absolute in a society.
The child also has the right to a decent upbringing, if one is to assume the continuance of harmonious society. One could vamp for a broken society of social problems by encouraging fatherless families. But out chosen pattern over the few millennia since we invented civilization is to bring children up in stable families, where the father was sent out to do hard labour of long hours and the mother, using my mother as an example, spent the day with me, the young child, feeding ducks in the park and visiting interesting places.
I looked something like this before I was born. I did not look much better when born.
But my fellow human in the above did not get to live. As in the Monty Python schetch, Mr. Praline played by John Cleese says:
Look, matey, I know a dead parrot when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now.”
The conversation can never be complete as there is a whole string of ethics about dealing with fetuses with congenital abnormalities. But even there, the concern is for the human that will be born. Prenatal screening tests can detect many inherited diseases.
In a legal argument in Ireland, the state was arguaing:
There is no actual claim to citizens’ rights on the part of the unborn until birth itself, which is a brightline event in the case of an unborn child.
Yet a barrister replied:
Are we really saying that if an expectant mother were to say ‘I believe that I can continue to climb ladders and work at heights until I’m about to deliver a child because its my decision to do so’… that the State has no value?
The state has a never-ending list of negative laws ‘Don’t do this. Don’t do that’ and its courts ignore the ethics of the Philosophy of Jesus with its ‘be good to others’ stand on ethics. The unborn has no rights as a citizen but it has ethical rights under religion. We have a clash of state and ethics.
