Personhood vs Property Why Every Georgian Should Be Concerned That Our Laws Treat Babies as Property By Ricardo Davis Imagine what your life would be like if you were the property of another human. Your owner could do with you as he or she wanted. Today in Georgia, he could use your body for economic gain – sex trafficking. Today she could dispose of you if you became an inconvenience, claiming her complete legal autonomy to do so is “reproductive justice.” Your owner could make lives a business, and amass a lot of money doing so. Yes, he could even make ending your life a sport if he so desired.
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In the 2000 epic historical drama Gladiator, actor Russell Crowe illustrated this. Many gladiators were sacrificed for an afternoon’s entertainment in the Coliseum. Lesser known today is the Roman contempt for young life. Before birth and well after it, a child’s life was never secure. Both Cicero and Seneca advocated the killing of weak or deformed children. Abortion, infanticide, child sacrifice, and child abandonment were all normal in Greco-Roman culture and widely practiced.
Many are familiar with Lord Acton’s quote, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” In his treatise Human Sacrifice, Acton traces from antiquity how different cultures and religions around the world practiced human sacrifices. From my vantage point, the treatise illustrates the corrupting power of stripping fellow humans of their personhood, whether for cultic or civil purposes. W.E.H. Lecky wrote that, “Infanticide was one of the deepest stains of the ancient civilizations.”
