Personhood

“What is a man?” asked Shakespeare. “What good is a newborn baby?” asked Churchill. Both a man and a baby have become difficult to define. The religious fanatics who increasingly pack courts and state legislators have a clear answer .

They claim, effectively, that a baby is any bit of human tissue with the potential to become a person. Technology, unfortunately, keeps redefining the boundaries. Once it was all any baby viable out of the womb. Then premature babies could live. Once it meant healthy babies. But technology saves many that were formerly miscarried or dead after a few days. Now the definition has been pushed back to favor for cell embryos, or eggs and sperm, or – soon – any cell that can be cloned .

“God’s gifts” they clamor. But all these god’s gifts eventually die, and have always died, sooner or later. Hard to believe that the exact moment matters all that much to any universal consciousness. 

The sad fact is that humans tend to treat other humans badly, especially if they are not in “our” tribe. What constitutes a person? We don’t even have to look back to the horrid customs of Carthaginians, Romans, Aztecs, or Nazis. Simply look at our own prisons, wars, politicians and… 

I think the current religious fervor in the USA is less about God and more about culture. The “right” kinds of persons are having too few children, the “wrong” too many. A “problem” since at least the time of Augustus .

We should definitely respect “persons.” But it’s hard when we are not sure what “persons” are  and anyway a lot of them are awful .