Personhood

As my regular reader knows, I am a public school board trustee (and have been since 1983 which is either admirable or obsessive, I'm not sure which). In that time I have visited many schools and classrooms, evaluated numerous programmes for students, and listened to countless delegations from parents and advocacy groups. I've read peer-reviewed and popular articles, interpreted the results of surveys, attended professional development sessions, and been advised by top-flight professional educators.

What all of this boils down to is simple. No matter how difficult the challenge or the expense of meeting it, or the disruption it causes to others, every child deserves full and equal opportunity to be all that they were meant to be.

Is there anyone reading this who disagrees? Hands up? That's what I thought. No matter how big or small, whether "red or yellow or black or white" (to quote the politically incorrect old song), male or female (or both or neither for that matter), verbal or non-verbal, at whichever end of the bell curve, possessing however many of the seven intelligences from zero to eight (allowing for the unrecognized ones), regardless of the social station of the family, a child is a deserving child by definition.

It wasn't always this way, of course. There was a time when society considered only some children to be deserving of the best education, with others not really needing any at all. Think of the opening scene of the marvellous movie The Miracle Worker where non-verbal, deaf and blind Helen Keller (played by academy award winner Patty Duke) goes from person to person at the dinner table, taking food from their plates to eat with her hands. No one could imagine that she should be educated save for her parents and Anne Sullivan (Anne Bancroft).

As a society we place a high value on personhood, and in our egalitarian way of thinking, would not rob any person of the fullness that life has to offer them. Personhood is a treasure above all others. Nothing compares in significance to it. It is the terminus a quo (starting point) and terminus ad quem (end point) of every discussion of human worth.

Think of the individuals and groups who have been denied full personhood, not just in horrific societies created by people like Hitler (Jews, gypsies and homosexuals), but even here in North America (Indians as we called them, women and girls, blacks, Chinese, and so on). It seems incredible that only in 1971 did women receive the right to vote in Switzerland. Further afield, women in Bhutan were so empowered only in 2008. While Canadian women were allowed to vote in 1917, Chinese Canadians, even those who had fought for Canada in World War II, did not receive this right until 1947. First Nations people had to wait until 1960.

We shake our heads in wonder at such bias, such hatred, such injustice. Why? Because we feel that these persons already had such rights by definition. The government's job was not to deem them worthy, but rather to recognize what they already deserved morally, and stop blocking them from their rightful place in society.

The question for me is this: does the government confer personhood or recognize it? In other words, is a person only a person when a legislative body deems them so, or is every living being a person on moral merit, whether society and the government have yet recognized it or not?

The future of abortion and euthanasia hang on the answer to this question. We give Henry Morgentaler the Order of Canada because government deems the unborn baby to be a non-person (and therefore unprotected by the human right to security of the person), and we put Robert Latimer in jail because he is seen to have killed a helpless person.

Needless to say, I recognize the personhood of the unborn baby (and the comatose dying senior for that matter) on the moral principle of the sanctity of life from conception. This is not simply an academic exercise for me. My wife and I have experienced a problem pregnancy. And I have had to deal (along with my siblings) with what to do about my dying father as the doctor asked us to consider "pulling the plug," as it were.

What difference would it make if the government (this won't happen under the leadership of the feckless Prime Minister Harper) were to accept my moral principle and to extent personhood and the rights that go with it to unborn children?

Before someone throws out the red herring of the reappearance of (mostly mythical) back-alley butcherings, the obvious things would be the birth of many more native-born Canadians (right now there are 30 abortions for every 100 live births in Canada), some women re-arranging their plans (and some men as well), many more females born in cultures where male babies are preferred, as well as more babies with physical and mental challenges (e.g. 80-90% of fetuses diagnosed with Down Syndrome are aborted presently). Other examples readily come to mind.

What impact would this have on Canadian society? I think that the modern classroom contains most of the answers. As we have integrated into regular classrooms more and more children with challenges to being educated in the typical fashion, we have had to pass more educational policies, increase educational funding, provide help to the classroom teacher, and generally balance the rights of all members of the class so that all persons present benefit but with no one, perhaps, benefiting as much as they could if everyone in the class were "mainstream" students (as was the case during my boyhood).

Would anyone say that this is too much bother? Too expensive? Indefensible? Well, to be truthful some do, but most don't. They feel that the moral principle of personhood trumps the other concerns, and accept the necessity of cost, and the frustration of balancing rights.

We have not yet extended this same way of thinking to the abortion issue. I find this unacceptable because my principles are moral, not economic or political. My understanding of my faith (and as a Protestant I'm not obliged to hold this as are people from other faith arenas) is that life is sacred. That is why I hold to neither abortion nor capital punishment. That is why I don't think of the abortion question as primarily a political one, any more than did those thousands of church leaders in the nineteenth century who waged holy war with the government over the slavery issue.

I'm with Robert Fulghum, author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. As he put it, "Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living."

Amen and amen.