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September/October, 1998 Volume XIII Number 2
Both China and the US have defined the unborn as property.
by R.J. Wick
In China, the unborn are property of the state.
In the US, the unborn are property of the parents, especially the mother.
That the US has defined the unborn as property is clear from cases such as Brian Peterson and Amy Grossberg in Delaware, and Marie Adams in Nevada; these people killed their babies shortly after birth. Our law treats this as criminal. Had the babies been aborted-killed shortly before birth, it would have been legal. Property can be destroyed, children (persons) cannot. And in Roe v Wade, the US Supreme Court majority opinion explicitly stated, "...the word 'person,' as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn."
Having defined the unborn as property, there is little to prevent a government from regulating it as it does with other pieces of property. To drive a car, we are required to have it registered and to have a license. What's to prevent the US government from requiring permits to have a child, or refusing to allow a couple to have a child via forced abortion? Both of these have been policies in China since the early 1980s and endorsed by America's (home-grown) Planned Parenthood. "China is the most extraordinary success. Irrespective of media speculation about that program, on the whole this is carried out in a very responsible way" (Family Planning World, Vol. 2, No. 2, March/April 1992).
Once a person has been defined as property it makes little difference whether the person is property of the state or property of someone else. Property is property; the legal status of the unborn in the US (as it is in China) is as a piece of property. This has opened a Pandora's Box filled with human rights infringements. Already, we have seen the consequences of this devaluation of human life in euthanasia, assisted suicide, teen-age murders in our schools, et cetera ...and there is, in principle, nothing to prevent the US government from instituting a forced-abortion policy like China's. It would be a mere regulation of what that same government has already defined as "property."
This is not far-fetched. Despite their "one-child" policy including forced abortions up to nine months; despite their blatant post-birth murdering of baby girls; despite their Tiananmen Square Massacre, and despite their overall oppression of any dissenting opinion, the current US administration extended the Most Favored Nation status to communist China. China's "one-child" policy and legal abortion in the US are two branches of the same tree.
R.J. Wick. operates veritatis nexus at www.cosworth-ltd.com/vn and has a masters in philosophy from Catholic U of America (Wash DC).
OTHER
COMMENTARY
ARTICLES
Fly in the ointment
The value of kids and kittens
Abortion mill beyond offensive
Both China and the US have defined the unborn as property
© 1997 Advocates for Life Ministries
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