GLANCE through the comments sections these days on articles about Planned Parenthood’s use of small bodies after they’re dead, and while there will be plenty of vitriol, there won’t be many different opinions. Generally, you’ll find just two: FOR or AGAINST. The AGAINSTs will be accusing the FORs of heartlessness and murder. And the FORs will be accusing the AGAINSTs of stupidity, hysteria, and conspiracy. (Every once in a while will appear a struggler, who was once a FOR but is truly shocked and reconsidering. Against this honest person both FORs and AGAINSTs will rail.)

Most prominent in many of the discussions will be one particular theme . . . a woman’s established right — to control her own body, and thus to abort. It is this original thought, on which the succeeding layers of abortion practices are based, that is most interesting (and most screechingly defended.)

Long ago the age passed that women actually believed children were not children until they were outside the uterus (that was 1960’s / ’70s era stuff, and before). Science has progressed far beyond that. If the fetus is simply tissue as a few still claim, then it would be more useful to science as live tissue than as dead (just as live rats, or live mice, or live bacteria). In that case, the abortion industry should endeavor to extract it still living, and give companies like StemExpress the option of offering live fetuses as well as specific body parts to its scientist clients.

We jest, obviously, just to put the “tissue” argument to rest. There is no veil these days over the fact that the decision for or against abortion is solely a moral one. ‬

This leads to the question at hand . . . what are a woman’s basic human rights? Does a woman have a right to kill? (We are speaking of children in utero — not self-defense situations, to which the answer is usually “yes,” and not out of utero children, to which the answer is always “no,” except from the most depraved.)

At the core, people who have thought through all these questions honestly and chosen a pro-abortion stance, have decided “yes.” But in reality no woman has the right to kill anyone. Some would say, anyone beside herself.  If we understand how painful suicide is to those left behind, we know that the high law of love should keep her from doing even that, though her body is “her own.” Even absent a belief in God, the most basic law of humanity has always acknowledged that killing is wrong. It’s universally known, deep in the soul.

‪True “rights” are not rightly given or taken away by human governments…if they were, then we could not condemn groups like ISIS or countries like North Korea, Syria, and Somalia whose governments have given the “rights” to do things we absolutely know are wrong. Since that’s the case, the fact that the government in America at some point gave whites the right to own slaves, or gave women the right to abort growing children, does not actually convey those rights upon them nor make them proper. ‬

‪This line of thought, of course, begins to raise the question of where human rights actually do come from, then, and who defines them. It’s a question the writers of the Declaration of Independence were quite decided on when they wrote that humans were:

“endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

Whether they follow a god or not, knowledgeable students of history are grateful for the long existence in the world of the idea that there is a God of goodness giving a code of right and wrong that supersedes what any particular government official may or may not decide is right at any given point — it is obvious to them that all the good in world governance has come from this sort of understanding (for it both restrains social chaos and guides culture toward the thing that makes for stability and longevity, namely, goodness), and that the relative prosperity and peace of “civilized” nations rests on a history of such beliefs (in cases where the god and the code are good, not evil). (Compare to government/societal systems that rest on atheism or some other belief system that does not acknowledge a higher law than the government or the consensus of the ruled (including direct democracy). The negative outcomes have always been apparent.) ‬

‪It is high (almost poetic) irony that our society, which is unique in history in its awareness of human rights, an awareness and a society which only exist because of a long history of belief in a higher code, now uses its resulting prosperity and freedom to try to tear down the foundational idea of a higher code upon which it is built. It’s a very good thing this tearing down didn’t happen hundreds of years ago, or free society as we know it would have never developed. (There’ve been tons of errors along the way, most only rectified when the higher code finally prevailed, i.e., slavery, etc.)

The first paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence in today’s speak break down to: “The Creator gave us certain rights, but you, King George, with the agreement of your people, have been abusing them. Therefore, we are breaking away from you.” Without a belief that the rights established by God supersede the opinions of governments, kings, and their subjects, America would never have declared herself, fought for herself, and ultimately flourished within her borders.

But now we find ourselves in a self-imposed state of a society-wide auto-immune disorder. The American body is attacking its own cellular structure. It is snipping connections to the higher code. It is granting “rights” that are not authorized by anyone with more authority than a fickle, pandering government and pride-blinded group thinkers. It is throwing an accusation of ignorance backward through history at the men who laid their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” down for their 200-years-later granddaughters and grandsons. And it is doing it in a frenzied state of high exulting — rather like fraternity rushers about to drink themselves dead.

It’s not surprising, but it certainly is irony worthy of Faust. ‬

‪So no — though human rights ought to be recognized by governments, real rights are not conveyed by governments. If they were, we would not exist. Now that everyone thinks they are, it might be appropriate to ask whether we will continue to exist. To be clear, a woman does not have a real right to choose life or death for another human being, no matter what her current government says (be it ISIS, DPRK, USA, anybody). And in the depth of her soul, she knows it.

As for the big hoopla in the news these days, Planned Parenthood’s debacle and the general public’s realization that aborted babies are legally used for lab tests . . . Let us just acknowledge that the idea of using a killed human’s tissue for research is a non-question to the moral thinker. Not quite worth debating. Although parents may rightly donate a minor child’s organs in the event of a tragic death, no court would extend that privilege to parents who had been the perpetrators or willing accomplices of the child’s death, nor to the ones who were paid to do the killing.