Being Human or Conscious Human Being?

What if a close family member of yours was involved in a horrible accident? What if they were stricken with terrible injuries that resulted in the loss of all of their mental functions--consciousness, reason, talents, even their memories--all wiped clean?

What if the family member was your sister and her physician told you of her excellent prognosis? What if her doctor told you that, not only would she survive, but also, in a relatively short period of time (let’s say 9 months) she would regain the function and use of all of her mental capacities?

Would it not be a violation of your sister’s most fundamental right to life if someone were to decide to take her life while she was in the hospital simply because she was not currently exercising her full capacity for mental function?

But this is exactly the kind of argument we face today in the abortion issue.

Some who attempt to justify the taking of life by abortion will say that the youngest of the preborn--those who have not yet realized their full mental capacities--are, in fact, living human beings, but not persons. They place an arbitrary line in the continuum of a person’s development, whereby conscious babies cannot be killed, but those not currently exhibiting consciousness are subject to the life or death choices of another individual.

This is an obvious absurdity. In the scenario above, your sister would be in the exact same position as the very young preborn child who has not yet realized all of their mental abilities, and no one would be allowed to violate her right to recover from her injuries and live. So too, no one should ever be allowed to violate the right to life of a preborn child.

The position of abortion proponents that consciousness (or any other function of a human being for that matter) signifies one’s personhood is simply not adequate to explain the concept of rights.

Rather, being human is enough. Every human being is a person with the right to life because, as the founders of our nation wrote, we are “endowed by our Creator” with this right. It is inherent in us from the moment of our lives began, at our creation.