Thursday, August 23, 2012

The Implications of "Personhood"


Apparently, a lot of people have criticized this candidate for sheriff’s insistence that he will use “deadly force” to stop an abortion in his county.   I can certainly see why you would criticize him if you reject the “personhood” thesis – the claim that a fetus is a full human person from the moment of conception.  However, if you accept that thesis, the candidate seems to be on solid moral ground.

Granted, he’s not on solid legal ground.  We have not (yet) decided, as a matter of law, that a fetus is a person entitled to all legal protections extended to persons – including prohibitions against being killed.  The fact that a candidate for sheriff is proposing to act contrary to current law is surely troubling.

But millions of people, including the Republican presidential and vice presidential candidates, are on record supporting the “personhood” thesis.  They want that thesis enshrined into U.S. law.  You would think that their criticism would be limited to his plan to use his office to impose his own moral views on others, as if his views were the law.  You would expect their criticism to focus on the importance of enforcing actual law, not one’s own convictions about what the law should be.

However, you should not expect any criticism of the sheriff candidate's stated willingness to use “deadly force” to protect “innocent persons” from slaughter – particularly when you, yourself, believe that this is what abortion constitutes.  If you accept the “personhood” thesis, as millions of Americans insist that they do, then using deadly force to protect innocent persons, including multi-celled zygote persons, makes perfect sense.

As Dr. Seuss taught us long ago, “a person is a person, no matter how small.”

Joe Huster






2 comments:

Chris Daida said...

I understand what you're trying to do here, and I hope it causes some to reevaluate their thesis. Still, I'll come out and just say that almost all "personhoodists" hold their thesis either uncritically or disingenuously and have no intention or moral incentive to work through the punishingly broad implications of their position. "Personhood," abortion, and euthanasia to these people are really wedges of state-sponsored religious privilege and dominionism.

Every personhoodist I know is actually not talking about "personhood" proper but something much less suitable for legal debate in a plural society. Theirs isn't so much an argument as religious speculation press fit, ad hoc, into abhorrent legislation. Ask any of them to define what "personhood" means, and they will almost always offer something that can be distilled to one thing: the soul. Follow up that question with an inquiry about the personhood status of great apes, and whether they deserve protection from slaughter, and you'll have all you need to know to rightly dismiss them as church-statists who will ignore you, the gadfly, just as uncritically as they adopted their personhood thesis on the basis of poorly justified religious speculation.

Anyway, something we can talk more about over beer.

Chris Daida said...

Screw "personhood." Arizona doesn't even need it anymore:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/10/az-abortion-bills-arizona-gestational-age_n_1415715.html