Women are human, right?
I’m fairly certain they are. They’ve got all the telltale signs. Complex thought processes. Self-motivation — and by that, I mean they can move, physically, although the other meaning, doing things of their own volition, is also a factor.
Now that I’m trying to define what being human means, I’m sorry for starting this way. It is fraught.
Next I almost suggested “bilateral symmetry” — meaning if you draw a line down the middle, we’re the same on both sides — then thoughtlessly elaborated with “two arms, two legs” but realized, in the nick of time, I’d end up getting chewed out by amputees who are, of course, still human despise their losses. A big tent, people.
Honestly, I feel like tossing the question to AI, after having looked askance at it last week. Contradictory, we humans … oh heck, why not? Everybody else does. Hey AI. what does being human mean?
“Being human means living as a blend of biological existence, conscious self-awareness and emotional connection to the world and others.”
Sounds right to me. And I did I hit the first two, physical and consciousness, on my own. As far as emotional connection … well, I’m not so sure about that. Could be more AI fantasy. Emotional disconnection seems all the rage nowadays — in fact, tossing people over the side of the humanity boat might be a defining mark of humanity. Everybody’s doing it.
Immigration papers not in order? You can be guiltlessly shipped to some hellhole in Texas or Uganda.
On the other side of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle? Why you and everyone like you can just … magically vanish. In fact, that’s the plan.
Gone through the difficult and daring process of living as a gender other than the one you were born with? You can’t serve in the military and your driver’s license is suddenly void in Kansas.
And don’t start on women in 13 states who want to wrest control of their gynecological processes from the Lord God Almighty, where they belong, apparently.
“I felt dehumanized,” Abbey Hall told the Indiana Capital Chronicle in 2024, of what happened after she discovered the baby she was carrying had a potentially fatal birth defect. “I felt like a criminal.”
And the mother of two would have been a criminal, too, in Indiana, had she tried to have an abortion, since her choice in the matter had been plucked out of her hands by men in Indianapolis, who are more moral and know better, in their own estimation.
But let’s not be too haughty regarding our neighbor, the Mississippi of the Midwest, imparting certain ambitious knots of tissue with constitutional rights denied their surrounding flesh vessels. A law was introduced in the Illinois Senate earlier this year doing just that.
State Sen. Neil Anderson (R-Andalusia) proposed a fetal personhood bill that would give a fertilized egg constitutional rights on Day One. Even abortion opponents cringed away from it — it raised the possibility of women having abortions being charged with first degree murder, though Anderson was quick to point out that wasn’t his intent. “There’s nobody up here that wants to put women in jail,” he said.
Why not? Because if the egg is a person, then wouldn’t its destruction be murder and the individual doing so liable? Except of course if that individual is a woman and, the unstated logic goes, not a full human being, not completely in charge of her own destiny, which what the law says in the 13 states that bar abortion. A dynamic which, in essence, weighs the rights of the actual human woman and the fertilized egg and decides the egg is calling the shots, as God intended. (I hope the legislature never declares the pancreas to be a person, too, because I’ve been thwarting God’s intentions for mine through medical science for nearly two years now.)
This is a complicated subject to dispatch in 795 words, so I want to leave you with a statistic that might not be generally known.
Roe v. Wade was reversed — the holy grail of the anti-abortion crowd — four years ago, and abortion in the United States has steadily gone up since then, from about 80,000 a month to around 100,000, thanks to a jump in abortions via mail — in pill form — and states such as Illinois throwing open their doors to surrounding red states. The aforementioned Abbey Hall came here to do what God intended to happen at some later time.
A reminder. Abortion is never going away because women — human beings, remember, at least in my book, with the capacity to determine their own morality and run their own lives — want it. What is in question is how difficult and expensive it will be to get.