Notes from Evil Bender

Few things anger me more than those who would strip rights from their fellow humans while having the audacity to claim to be defending human rights. So my morning isn’t off to a good start since I discovered, via Canadian Cynic, I learned of Mark Peters (tagline: “Canadian. Christian. Conservative.”) who’s on board with the “forced-childbirth-upholds-human-rights” meme. He begins by quoting that bastion of the Hitler youth morality, Pope Ratzi:

“The fundamental human right, the presupposition of every other right, is the right to life itself… This is true of life from the moment of conception until its natural end. Abortion, consequently, cannot be a human right – it is the very opposite.”

For these people, it’s worth noting, the “right” to be alive preempts all other rights, most especially the right to our own bodies. Notice the twisted framing Ratzi uses: people have the “right” to be forced to live out their entire lives, and therefore have no “right” to choose when their time comes. To uphold individual liberty, Ratzi says, we must force people to give up the right to make choices about their own bodies.

(As an aside, I’ve lost more than one friend to suicide, and I can say with confidence that the hurt hasn’t diminished much with the years. I wish my friends had sought professional help, for they might be hear yet, but I don’t begrudge them their choice: in the end, they had every right and responsibility to make that decision for themselves.)

So it’s not just abortion Ratzi is on about. But oh yes, that cluster of undifferentiated cells is a human life and must be made to live–even if on a feeding tube against its wishes–and must, if it is female, be forced to give birth against its wishes. And all this, Ratzi says, is in defense of its “human rights.”

No word yet on why the all-powerful, loving God Ratzi professes to believe in would choose to terminate one in five fetuses before they are born.

Peter’s is all over Ratzi like–damn, good taste prevents me from making this particular Catholic joke. Anyway, he’s all over Ratzi:

This is exactly why I contend we must always describe the unborn in distinctly human terms. Describing the unborn in medical terms, such as “fetus”, I believe, subtly dehumanizes the unborn and therefore automatically diminishes their individual human rights. Discussions regarding human rights and abortion then focus strictly on the rights of the prospective mother.

Yeah, nothing hurts ones arguments like using correct terminology. That two-week old growth in the room isn’t self-sustaining and while it is alive (it has living cells) that doesn’t prove it is human any more than individual discarded skin cells are human. But no matter, for it doesn’t make any difference to my stand on abortion when “human life” begins: the fact is that no human has the right to demand of another to shelter it within one’s body, to be forced to provide it nourishment and to sustain its life, no matter the risk and personal cost to the host.

It’s not a question of whether women’s rights are not important, for surely they are. Rather it’s a question of whether the life in the womb is equally human, and therefore of equal value.

Women’s rights are important to Peters in the same way that human rights are upheld by forcing people not to end their own lives. Peters values women’s rights so much that he is going to force them to give birth.

And the question is not about a fetus being “equally human,” for he is in fact trying to extend to the fetus special rights, rights none of us, including the fetus’ host, have: the right to live parasitically off another human being against her will. I doubt very much that Peters would agree that by his own logic we should allow abortion to save the life of the mother–no doubt he’d argue the fetus and mother should have the “right” to go through labor and die “naturally.” But if the woman’s life is equally important, then she must have the right to terminate the pregnancy, for if she is denied that right, then she is dehumanized: she is merely the body from which a fetus must be harvested, not a conscious being with the most basic of human rights: the right to control one’s own body.

If I could get one message out about anti-choice framing (or fascism of any kind), it would be to beware those who would take away one’s rights through a rhetoric of personal freedom, for such a frame lays claim to the very values it disingenuously seeks to destroy.