What Could Go Wrong?

The Satanic Temple is suing Indiana for their "near-total abortion ban." They claim that it violates provisions of the Constitution and temple tenets. Now, I was not aware that laws cannot violate religious tenets, so that was news to me. But, moving on, they claim that a baby in the womb at 24 weeks is "part of the pregnant woman's body and not imbued with any humanity or existence separate from her." Since one of their primary tenets is absolute personal sovereignty, she should be allowed to do with "her body" whatever she wants. Now we can debate all day long about religious freedom and the freedom of religion to impose laws on everyone else. We can have long duels with words over whether or not a fetus is a human being and what is the magic that turns it into one at some point? And at what point? We can pull out science and religion and philosophy and battle this out. But I have a different question. If we are excluding what is scientifically defined as a "human being" in the womb from being human and, therefore, excluding it from any intrinsic worth, where does intrinsic human worth come from? If we are excluding religion entirely (unlike, say, the Founding Fathers who based our rights on a Creator) from the question, on what basis is it wrong to kill a human but not wrong to kill, say, a mouse? What criteria are we going to use to classify a being as "intrinsically valuable" and ... not?

Australian philosopher Peter Singer argues that preferring humans over animals is "speciesist" just as preferring one race over another is racist. He bases the valuation on being personally aware. In his version, a 2-year-old human child is no more self-aware than a 3-year-old chimpanzee and shouldn't, therefore, have special valuation. In his version, a Down Syndrome child never gains real self-awareness and should be able to be eliminated (or used for experimentation like other lesser animals) even after birth. Now, while most of us would rebel at that evaluation, we also tend to have a mere intuition about why or what we feel. We sense that there is a qualitative difference between a human child and a baboon baby, but what that is isn't really defined in our minds. But there are still many among us who claim "life is life" and deny, like Dr. Singer, any intrinsic, special value in humans. So how do we determine it? Where does it come from? Is there any logical reason to confer special value on human beings over any other living thing?

I am convinced that apart from God there is no possible, consistent, rational argument that applies any special value to human beings over other living things. We can assert "volition," but animals make choices. We can assert "emotion," but animals experience emotion. We can assert "reasoning," but animals do indeed have reasoning. If we try to claim levels -- humans have higher levels of these kinds of things -- then we simply set up a hierarchy of valuation when it's okay to kill an ant, less okay to kill a mouse, really less okay to kill an ape, not okay to kill a human. Simply because a human has more. Oh, that sounds quite "supremacist," doesn't it? And quite arbitrary. "Because we can" is a bad reason to deem something as moral. So I'm pretty sure that our current trend to eliminate God from the public square will eliminate things we don't want eliminated. It's wrong to kill humans because they are made in the image of God. Okay, well, God is out. So it's wrong to kill humans because they're human ... unless we deem them not yet human. Then it's wrong to kill humans over the age of, say, 5 years old because have you seen what animals those younger kids are? And over 80, because most of them have lost much of their human faculties. Look, why not broaden that? What makes the 6-to-79 crowd more valuable than the rest? On what basis do we regulate that? Without God, none. We're currently standing firm, feet planted in air, holding fast to human worth while denying it in the womb and thinking we're safe. What could go wrong?