In the United States, thanks to a 1973 ruling by the same illustrious body that brought us Dredd Scott and Bush v. Gore, the federal government recognizes the right of women to terminate the life of their pre-birth fetuses at their own discretion. By this recognition, the federal government both denounces any responsibility to protect from violent interference those fetuses and, for the most part, prohibits state and municipal governments, parents of impregnated minors, and the surprisingly still-existent specimens of fathers from protecting them when the expectant mother in question has made the choice to annihilate them.
Notice above that we have said the government "recognizes" this right, not that the government has "granted" or "bestowed" this right. The difference is key. An entitlement--whether or not it is legitimate--which is bestowed by an authority is a privilege, not a right. The government bestows on certain citizens the privilege of driving on public roads; a business bestows on certain clientèle the privilege of using its facilities; parents bestow on children the privilege of enjoying the toys for which the parents have paid; a church bestows on certain parishioners the privilege to serve in various ritual ministries. The meat and potatoes of privileges lie in the granting authority, and should that authority be capricious in the granting or rescinding of privileges, them's, as the bards do sing, the breaks.
Rights are a different matter altogether. A right is something to which a being is necessarily entitled as a result of the simple act of being the type of being it is. The gravitas of rights lies in the nature of the very being in question itself. When speaking of inanimate beings, any talk of "rights" at least borders on absurd unless those inanimate beings are compounded into elaborate cosmic and ecological systems.
The rights of animals make more and more common sense the higher up the food chain one goes. Few would deny, at very least, the right of sentient animals to not be senselessly killed en masse for sport or tortured for thrills. Various theories attribute ever-ascending amounts of debatable rights to animals, up to and including the staunchest moral veganism. What unites all such approaches is the recognition that, whatever rights they believe belong to animals, those rights are not granted by an outside authority, but rather discerned as flowing from the nature of what it is to be an animal.
At the pinnacle of the community of beings within the known material cosmos stands the human person, the rational animal and free moral agent endowed by virtue of his humanity with the utmost dignity and the rights that flow from that dignity, that is, the right to unimpeded access to all that is necessary for his full flourishing as a human person, from the most fundamental--life itself--to material necessities, a nurturing community of equals, cultivation of the life of the mind, ability to discern free moral choices, and so forth.
Anything which is discerned to be a legitimate right says something very powerful about the type of being whose right it is. The right of, say, a puppy dog to not be nailed to a fence for no reason speaks to its great intrinsic value when compared to, say, an inanimate hunk of plastic painted on which are the words "no trespassing." That education, health care, noninterference with sexual and family constitution, and consent to governance are frequently recognized as human rights speaks volumes about the inestimably high dignity of the human person. In the Western world--Christian, Jewish, aboriginal, or secular--our post-Enlightenment society, building on the discoveries of late medieval Scholasticism, and increasingly throughout the globe wherever the imprint of the West is felt, we recognize that the highest dignity belongs to all human persons of both genders and all ethnic backgrounds equally.
Thus we recognize that women, in a way complimentary to and equal with men, are the beings highest in dignity within the known material cosmos.
Or do we?
The right to abortion is often celebrated as one of the major successful steps in the just and necessary liberation of women from ages of Western failure to recognize their dignity. Abortion rights are framed as the right of a woman to control her own body; it is reproductive freedom, forbidding any outsider, whether it be her baby-daddy or the federal government of the United States of America from legislating what she may or may not do with her body.
An impressive argument, no doubt, when one judges the merit of arguments solely by their ability to be typed using letters of the alphabet.
For those who set the bar of logic a tad higher, allow me to eradicate this argument: the fetus is not a body part. The relationship of fetus to woman-making-choice is that of parasite to host, not of part to whole. The argument, therefore lacks only one thing: merit. It is not wrong, per se; it is simply meaningless.
Far from being a great step forward toward achieving full recognition of their dignity, the assertion that a woman has a right to abort her unborn child necessarily makes women subhuman. Recall that rights flow from the very nature of the being who possesses them and, therefore, make qualitative statement about the essence of that being. What statement does the right to abortion make about women? That right leads to the unavoidable conclusion that a woman is the type of being who by her very nature is intrinsically entitled to terminate the life of her own offspring.
Killing one's own offspring is far beneath the dignity of men. Men who do this have acted inhumanely--and inhumanly--and are rightly removed from the general population and segregated in prisons. It is far beneath the dignity of human persons in general--one must take several Darwinian steps backward to find the closest species wherein the mothers kill their young.
To assert, as our Supreme Court has to our undying abject disgrace, that a woman has a right to abortion is to assert that a woman is inferior to a man--indeed that she is inhuman.
I, for one, am not comfortable with this one bit. I contend, rather, that men and women together share in complimentary and equal ways in the highest dignity within the known material cosmos, human personhood, and that this personhood is lived out in its most suitable and dignified fashion when we all give of ourselves for the good of others--when we don't say "this is my body, keep your laws off of it," but, rather, "this is my body, given up for you."
Nowhere in the known universe is the relational, gift-based dignity of humankind lived out more beautifully than in the literal giving of a mother's body to her developing child.
May the day come and come quickly when the lie of abortion rights is exposed for the anti-woman, anti-person crime against humanity that it is.
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