Abortion and infanticide are the fruits of collectivism’s ‘human rights’
From a liberty perspective, abortion and infanticide are nothing short of being a criminal act of deprived indifference concerning human life, but from the perspective of collectivism, such depravity isn’t just ethical, its moral.
Earlier this month, I wrote an article about a law being proposed by legislators in the state of Maryland that not only guarantees access anytime, anywhere, for any reason, but it also legalizes infanticide by permitting the murder of babies after they are born.
In hindsight, I was reminded of a piece written by guest contributor Joe Marshall about how the lack of value placed on human life is the fruit of collectivism’s so-called human rights. So, I (David) have decided to post an edited edition of his article with the hope that it will shed some light on the culture of death that permeates our society.
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As some have lamented, the spiritual burden of being associated with a society seemingly hell-bent on executing the cold depravity of a moral social commodity in the violence of universal abortion is real. It weighs heavily on all of us who see the life, not to mention wonder and innocence, in the trusting souls of our children.
The Strident Conservative points out that “the pro-life, conservative, Christian community has suffered” much loss under “the new Nationalist movement,” though I fear the “greatest losses” for liberty are yet to come. But as he says, there is “a way forward,” which “begins with the courage to tell the truth no matter how inconvenient and ugly that truth is.” So, I am moved to shed some more disturbing light on the truth of why abortion isn’t just an acceptable aspect of the collectivism we’ve come to embrace on both the Left and Right but a necessary one.
The callous concept of abortion and infanticide being necessary aspects of a happy, healthy family, community, and sustainable world is the offspring of the same progressive collectivism that denied Dred Scott his “personhood,” upheld Jim Crow Laws, and established abortion as a “right to privacy” in the context of the “potential human life” of the fetus. Our Constitution protects all of the individual rights and liberty of “We the People” and/or all “Persons,” which, of course, means nothing for those deemed legally unworthy of their person or life status.
The Strident Conservative makes an appeal that “life begins at conception and we must not surrender that truth,” nor should we. But the truth is that many in the bioethics of progressive academia have already conceded that the fetus is indeed life. Not just any life, but human life.
But what is key to understand here is that the philosophy of collectivism at large — be it anarchist, humanist, communist, or nationalist in a kingdom, dictatorship, tribe, or democracy — has never allowed for an intrinsic value in any individual human life as the value and rights of all in a collective are conditional. The only value human life can have in a collective is the value added to it.
The sustainability of the U.N. Brundtland Report and our own Title X policies. Margaret Sanger’s “unwanted child” and the eugenics of “justified existence” of G.B Shaw. The “moral liberty” of Rousseau and Malthus’ population control.
These are examples of collectivism and how it not only justifies abortion and infanticide but mandates it. If you fail to meet these conditions, you’re neither “morally” or “ethically” worthy of any right, including life. To afford such individual rights would place an unreciprocated burden on the State.
Consider what you would do as a farmer whose chickens have stop laying eggs. Would you keep feeding them anyway or sell them for soup? In such a scenario we understand it’s simply a matter of utility for the farmer to do what he needs to do to stay in business. In a collective, it’s the people who are the chickens, their “duties” are the eggs, and the central planners are the farmers.
Unlike natural individual rights and liberty, collective rights are conditional, hence the underlying “moral structure” of all collective human rights of human origin. No right can be spoken of outside the context of duties owed in return and the correlating manifestation of a moral life and personality, value, liberty, and personhood.
A moral person with a moral right to life is only the person currently tending to and satisfactorily performing the social duties necessary to obtain the moral personhood necessary for a right to life. Stop performing your duties, and you will be thrown away as ethically as a dead battery.
Intrinsic value or “Sanctity of Life” arguments made on behalf of an individual human life of any age must be dismissed as untethered crazy talk if not a punishable anti-social act against the moral structure and well-being of the collective. The sad thing is that most self-proclaimed progressives and human rights activists have no clue of the full context of what they’ve bought into. That’s not to say they will be kept in the dark forever, as the call for a Universal Declaration of Duties and Responsibilities has already gone out.
Under the progressive moral structure, animals, rivers, mountains, and entire ecosystems are afforded “moral personhood” while “sub-person” and “potential person” and/or “post-person” human beings are being denied it.
The more our society demands the collectivism of redistributive justice, the stronger and more justified the argument for conditional human rights will be.
Abortion, infanticide, population control, and eugenics will become ethically acceptable and morally mandated because that’s how collectivism works. The simple truth is that if we don’t want these dehumanizing, enslaving things in our future, we need to reject the collectivism that is contingent upon whether human life begins at conception or not.
As our society inches ever closer to its universal surrender to full-blown collectivism, the more the hard truth of these things will become a reality, but by that time, they will have a stronger hold on us.
How much time, if any, do we have left to reconsider?
Joe Marshall was born and raised in the Finger Lakes Region of Upstate NY. He is a married father of two grown sons, an outdoorsman, a landscape contractor, a former stock car owner and driver, a certified 4H firearms instructor, and a retired New York State corrections officer.
Joe is the author of the book, Last Call for Liberty
