Baby On Board [Clinton Wilcox]

I've spent the last week in England and will be returning to California tomorrow. It's been a wonderful week but I'll be happy to finally be going home. I will look forward to returning next year. The three articles I wrote this week were written in England (the first one in Battle East Sussex, the second and third in London).

As I was riding in the tube to get to a destination, I saw a pregnant woman wearing a button that said "baby on board". It's a rear windshield placard I used to see around here in California, but this one had the official logo of the Underground tube on it. The button was officially made by the Underground tube in a country in which abortion is legal up until 24 weeks.

This kind of thing underscores the extreme inconsistency in our cultures. In the United States, in some states if you murder a pregnant woman, you'll be tried for two murders, as in the case of Scott and Lacy Peterson. Yet if the mother allows the child to be killed, it is no longer murder but abortion. Wantedness or unwantedness should not determine one's moral status, yet in many countries, that is exactly the situation we have.

Whether or not a person is wanted is a completely arbitrary consideration for human value. There are many people who are not valued, yet it would still be wrong to kill them (e.g. homeless people are generally seen as drains on society, but we cannot kill them). These kinds of laws just underscore how dangerous it is to live in the womb in our societies. No society is safe unless that society grounds human value in the nature of the human being, not in some arbitrary property possessed by that individual.