Sunday, December 7, 2008

Murder by any other name...


A man who was convicted of two murders after he killed a woman who was eight months' pregnant, failed to convince a Texan court that only religious people believe life begins at conception, according to a news report.

Interestingly, though, Jacob Eguia has a point when he says that if he is guilty of murder for killing an unborn child, so are abortionists who do this for a living. State law gets around this awkward state of affairs by making an exception for abortion, but giving abortionists a get-out clause only renders the law more absurd. Since the state recognises that human beings have the right to legal protection from the moment of conception, how can it allow human beings to be butchered simply because the person committing the act of killing is a doctor and the murder scene is a clinic?

The core issue in this case is that of personhood, the court found that personhood begins at conception. Over the cunturies the issue of personhood has been used by elites to deny the humanity of a person, a group or even an entire race. It was on the basis of denial of personhood that hundreds of thousands of men and women of African origin were kidnapped, transported and forcibly enslaved in the colonies. Women in past centuries have also been treated as non persons. In this age it is the turn of the unborn baby to be treated as non persons in order to establish the radical feminist dream of a so called "right" to abortion. This decision is therefore a vitally important step in the articulation of the rights of babies before birth and because of this will undoubtedly be challenged.