Personhood vs Property: Why Every Georgian Should Be Concerned That Our Laws Treat Babies as Property

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. 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.”

Early Christians were notable for their stance upholding the worth of children. They understood that each person was created in the image of God, and lived out that truth even to the point of illegally saving abandoned children and adopting them. They were at odds with the ancient Roman Empire.

Another historian, Ferdinand Schenck, wrote that “The intrinsic worth of each individual man and woman as a child of God and an immortal soul was introduced by Christianity.” That concept went deep into the conscience of Rome, and later Europe. After making Christianity legal, Emperor Constantine enacted many laws to protect human life.

Follow The Chain Of Events

You’ve probably heard of philosopher Richard Weaver’s famous dictum “ideas have consequences.” The idea that life is sacred – even in the weak, deformed, or unwanted – made its way from Jesus to His followers, to cultures, to governments, and even to laws. It took centuries to happen, but those laws, and that idea, held sway for many more centuries in the West. Today, they’re losing ground.

Modern legal systems, particularly in the Western common law nations, see all things as either persons or property. For hundreds of years, with unfortunate exceptions, human beings were held to be persons from conception to their last breath. Now the exceptions are becoming the rule. Persons are becoming property – things that can be used by more privileged people or the state.

Follow The Money

Evidence of the decline of personhood abounds, from erosion of the rule of habeas corpus, to property confiscation without due process, to human trafficking – and much more. But the most serious setback is that certain classes of people

can be deemed non-persons by law. And if they’re nonpersons, they’re property – to be bought, sold, discarded, or used as desired. Just follow the money and you’ll understand why some people want to own other people as property. It’s self-evident in the elective abortion industry. “My body, my choice” is more than just political sloganeering by the abortion lobby.

By the end of the 19th century, America had extinguished

the resurgence of elective abortion, commonly referred to as “medical malpractice,” by dealing with the corruption in state and local governments that allowed its practice. With the rise of social Darwinism on the one hand and political libertinism on the other, the 20th century ushered in unrestricted elective abortion on Georgia babies during their first three months of life in the womb. Babies in the second and third trimester had only slight protections, easily circumvented by law or practice. Babies became property, and were rendered so by legal constructs that changed their status.

Now 21st century America is removing the scant protections as states governments are funding elective abortion and permitting infanticide with those children that survive an attempted abortion. Legislative attempts to declare the personhood of the pre-born child are legal dead ends when the legislation fails to treat elective abortion as homicide.

Legalizing Experimentation and Extermination

Much like Germany in the 1940s, the laws in the U.S. allow for experimentation on and extermination of pre-born babies. An experiment conducted in 2008 provides the disturbing proof that babies are considered property.

Cornell University researchers experimented with genetic modification in humans. They injected a fluorescent gene from an Australian jellyfish into a healthy pre-born infant. The goal was to see if the child’s cellular division would pass on the fluorescent trait. It did. The baby became the first animal/ human hybrid and glowed in the dark. Later, the baby was killed under regulations that permitted government-funded human embryonic research. To date there are no federal restrictions prohibiting privately funded

research on children at the early stages of their lives.

If you find this event chilling, you’re not alone – but the mentality is nothing new. The Nazi medical researcher Josef Mengele experimented in a similarly inhuman way. Like the Cornell researchers, he treated his subjects as property – as things he could manipulate any way he liked.

Lutheran pastor and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s take on this mentality in German culture was incisive.

“Destruction of the embryo in the mother’s womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And this is nothing but murder.

A great many different motives may lead to an action of this kind; indeed in cases where it is an act of despair, performed in circumstances of extreme human or economic destitution and misery, the guilt may often lie rather with the community than with the individual. Precisely in this connection money may conceal many a wanton deed, while the poor man’s more reluctant lapse may far more easily be disclosed.

All these considerations must no doubt have a quite decisive influence on our personal and pastoral attitude towards the

person concerned, but they cannot in any way alter the fact of murder.”

The Way to Advancing Personhood

The mentality that classifies some people as property is disturbing. Many people justify it with utilitarian thinking. The history of mankind illustrates that a low view of human life does not confine itself to those we don’t care about. It will eventually affect every one of us. Before long, any one of us could be targeted and stripped of our personhood.

The first step to reverse the cheapening of life is restoring the Christian legacy of personhood in our communities. Georgia’s abortion laws are like a longabandoned building: there is little to no protection to the child from the icy death grip of winter. Unless families, churches, social service organizations, businesses, and elected officials in Georgia work to rebuild protections for all innocent human life from lethal threats, no statewide effort or legislation will reverse the trend.

In the 19th century, local efforts exerted pressure to end the American slave trade by refusing to obey laws that sustained it on one hand and providing shelter and protection to slaves that escaped on the other hand. Because people aren’t property, it’s time to apply similar pressure to end elective abortion across Georgia.