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Ontology For Dummies

I'm no Bryan Cross, or Roger Scruton, or Alasdair MacIntyre, but when I see a young chicken hatching from an egg, it's not a "potential" chicken; it's a chicken. If someone plants a young sapling of a tree, it's not a "potential" tree; it's a tree. Trees and chickens are supposed to be trees and chickens. Neither one--apart from what we decide to do with them--is a cow, or a brick. There might be different developmental stages of each, and we could call them by different names at each stage, but what the thing is should not be under serious question.

We've got people out there (apparently) confused about what the thing is as it pertains to humans. A human fetus is a human person at a very early stage of development. This person is not a brick, or a tree, or a chicken. We don't become persons by exercising capacities; we are persons who exercise capacities. If we decide--as has been decided many times before, to disastrous effects--that another person has the right to decide what a "person" is, ontology becomes utility. Utility as a measure of rights is sanctioned violence and oppression.

Of course, this is about abortion, but not only that. There are myriad ways that people can be "un-personed." It happens all the time. It's just in this case, we permit it, and celebrate it. We fancy ourselves "enlightened" and "progressive," don't we?

How effective our propaganda is, too! If the dissenters can be dismissed as misogynists and haters, the exploitation of the vulnerable continues with barely a fuss. There was a man who warned us about this. Against the backdrop of #metoo, that man may say,--in a slight paraphrase of an American president and actor--"Are you better off than you were 60 years ago?" Everything he predicted came true.

Many people claim that love motivates their support for abortion rights. How are you loving the woman in your life by escorting her to a place where a mother leaves as a grieving mother? This wretched popular society likes to ignore those women, and give them every opportunity to push the grief aside, to ignore it, and then to become dead to it. Death begets death, in a cruel mockery of the life it takes.

Motherhood is thankless and hard, and in some ways, involuntary. We know this. Just ask your mom what she'd have rather been doing when she was cleaning up after you. But she did it anyway.

The rock band U2 has an old song called, "Mothers of the Disappeared" about the victims of a brutal Latin American dictatorship. Mothers are still mothers, even when their children are gone.

Mothers are still mothers, even if they didn't want to believe they were. As the reckoning at Nuremberg came for the brutality of a previous age, so also there will be a reckoning for us. All the fine parties and refined speech will be stripped away, and what we have done will be laid bare. Lord, have mercy!

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