See that black and white blob?

That is my son, Dawson. He’s going to be three in November. He is no longer physically dependent on my body for sustenance. He is sentient. He can feel pain. He has fully-formed features.



He meets all of the criteria which determine his “personhood,” according to the abortion-choice crowd. Now he has made it through the magical birth canal, he has rights as a “person.” Pro-abortionists have realized they can no longer pretend the preborn are not human. Wombs do have windows these days, in the form of ultrasounds, and even someone lacking the least bit of scientific knowledge can see preborn human babies are in fact preborn human babies.



Instead of human beings possessing innate, intrinsic value based on nothing but their status as human beings made in the image of God, we have now made human value conditional. And when human value is conditional, it does not take long for our human rights to become conditional.



It is no longer humanity which matters, but a legal concept of personhood.



When I look at my son in that picture, and I think about the fact our society has come to the conclusion they get to decide if he has value or not, I feel a deep sense of injustice and pain. My son lives today solely because I as his mother chose not to exercise my societally accepted “right” to determine his value — his personhood.



In the eyes of the world, if I had decided his life interfered with something as absurd as my convenience, I would be granted the de facto right to determine his life was without intrinsic value, and therefore able to be disposed of as I personally saw fit. The idea the “empowerment” the abortion-choice lobby “won” for me is no less than the power to spit in God’s face and determine a child made in His image is medical waste — simply because I feel giving birth to a baby I chose to conceive is too difficult — makes me weep.



And then it makes me want to fight.



If this is female empowerment, I do not want it.



My precious baby boy was powerless in that photo. He was voiceless. He was entirely and completely at my mercy. Innocent — unable to even cry out. Yet our society has chosen the onus is on him to prove his own personhood.



Let that sink in.



Our society has chosen the burden falls upon voiceless unborn children to prove they have a right to not be killed by us — their mothers.



We must reject this mentality.



Enough is enough.



Decades ago, perhaps, we could claim some level of ignorance. We could pretend we did not know when life started. We could leave the preborn out of sight and out of mind, imagining they are nothing more than “clumps of cells.” Today, pro-abortionists admit these are human babies we are killing. We have let them get away with this absurd differentiation between “human” and “person.”



Okay, then. We will do it their way. If you are about to demolish a building, the burden is upon the person doing the demolishing to be absolutely certain no person is inside. We must demand the burden of proof falls upon those wishing to do the killing to prove the precise moment at which the preborn become persons, by their own logic.



Do not our unborn children deserve at least the same consideration as mass rapists on death row before we kill them?



Can we not demand that much?



This point where personhood is assumed must be universally and repeatedly observable. It must be a coherent set of standards. Unless and until this point is found, we must err on the side of presuming personhood.



Of course, the truth is there are only two logically-coherent points at which we can find a repeatable conclusion of personhood: conception or birth. All other standards laid out by abortion-choice advocates — ability to feel pain, size, viability, etc. — can either apply equally to born people, or cannot be determined universally in any case.



Let us see how popular the pro-abortion position becomes when they finally admit logically speaking, by their own ethic, there is zero reason to oppose crushing the skull of an eight-month-old fetus.



The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Human Defense Initiative.