1st of December
By Alex Ruggles
No, this blog post is sadly not about the relative virtues of various toboggans. Rather it will explore four descriptive characteristics commonly used to dehumanise the unborn and legitimise abortion. SLED stands for Size, Level of Development, Environment and Degree of Dependency. Each of these characteristics are often used as arbitrary measures of humanity by those in favour of abortion. The aim of this post is to outline how these characteristics can be used to describe different humans but they do not encapsulate humanity itself.
Lets begin with size. If we argue that a person at their smallest and earliest stage, i.e a zygote, is not really a human and thus can be aborted, then we are left with an obvious question: at what size or stage does a person magically become human and claim the inherent right to life? Size of course does not determine worth and to argue that size is indicative of humanity is to concoct an utterly arbitrary measure after a human life has already begun. The logical endpoint of such an argument creates two conclusions. It would firstly find that if human worth is directly related to size then tall people are more valued than short people, that adults are more valuable than children and that men are more valuable than women-all of these statements are, of course, absurd. A second possible conclusion would be that human life begins to have values at a stage other than which it was created; what stage is this and what boundary size does a human have to reach to then be valued as a human being with inherent worth? If we are to value human life as possessing absolute worth, then this human has to have inherent worth regardless of size.
So, lets turn to the second characteristic, level of development. Again, at what level of development does a human life have worth if it is not at the moment of conception when it’s development begins? What stage of development would an individual have to pass through to qualify for a right to life? Why does an individual only begin to have value after a certain stage in the eyes of a pro-abortion advocate and what stage is this? All valuations of life that occur after conception are arbitrary and subjective. We do not become more human as we grow we simply develop along the human path; no human grows if it is not already alive. A human being looks like a zygote at the zygote stage because that is the correct development of that particular human at that particular time. Human value cannot grow or increase, and to believe it can has dangerous implications for the born and unborn alike. The elderly often lose some of the faculties they had when they were younger but this does not mean they lose any of their humanity. Similarly if I were to be in a car accident and ended up in a wheelchair, I would be technically ‘less developed’ and ‘more dependent’ than my peers but I would still be entirely human.
The third topic to discuss is that of environment, or location. Now the argument that pro-abortion advocates put forward essentially claims that human life is less valuable inside the womb than out of it. Thus, the argument must be that, by travelling through the birth canal a human being magically becomes imbued with the inherent right to life. This is of course erroneous; if an individual has inherent worth then its location should not matter, its value is not dependent on where it is but is integral to its very being. Sickeningly, abortion ensures that a place in which a child should be safest is actually where they are most vulnerable. Bodily autonomy is often cited as a justifiable reason for abortion but one has to ask the question, bodily autonomy for whom? Abortion violates a pre-born baby’s bodily autonomy in the worst possible way. That baby did not choose to be there, it did not appear in its mother through the result of its own actions, rather it is simply in the place it should be for a human at its stage of growth.
This brings us onto the final topic of SLED: degree of dependency which is arguably the central point of the abortion debate. Science incontrovertibly proves that life begins at conception, this debate can no longer be about when life begins, it can now only be about whether the direct intentional killing of a human life is acceptable because of the child’s absolute dependence on their mother. In order to argue that this is not acceptable, as all pro-lifers do, we must discuss the concept of viability. The UK law of abortion up to 24 weeks is based on when a newborn child can survive outside of the womb, although even this is not an accurate law as babies have been shown to be able to survive at 21 weeks. The argument in favour of abortion uses viability to argue that a child should be allowed to be killed because they are not viable to survive outside the womb on their own. This argument misses two key points; firstly, the reality is that a baby (born or not) can only survive through their utter dependency on other individuals. A parent or guardian has a responsibility to nurture that child up until the age of maturity at eighteen and even after that point every human is dependent in some way or another on other individuals. Secondly, this point fails to recognise that the vulnerability and dependency of a child, both born and pre-born imparts a degree of responsibility to the rest of humanity to safeguard their inherent right to life, rather than violate it. Its very dependency creates a moral commitment for other individuals to protect the child and to recognize their innate value.
The easiest way to dehumanise a section of society is to claim that its members are ‘not like us’. All of the ‘SLED’ characteristics can be used to do just this, the unborn are smaller than us, are less developed, they exist in a different environment to us and they have a higher degree of dependency. But every born person is also different to everyone else when it comes to these factors. We are not carbon copies of each other.
Human life, which begins at conception, has innate worth regardless of subjective and arbitrary valuations.
