Court Decides a 6-Day-Old Baby Is Not a Person

This was graphically highlighted in a recent news report. In 2008 a Long Island woman was driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol when she was involved in a head-on collision. She was in her third trimester and the baby girl was delivered via C-section following the crash but, sadly, died six days later from injuries related to the crash. This woman was originally charged with second-degree manslaughter, driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol, and endangering a child. But these charges were recently overturned by the New York Court of Appeals when it was determined that “she was not guilty because she fatally injured her daughter before she was born. The court ruling compared the mother’s actions to self-induced abortion and called it an offense that is ‘no greater than a misdemeanor.’” Current legislation in New York does not “subject to criminal liability . . . prenatal conduct that results in postnatal death.” This is similar to another case I blogged about back in April.

So this woman was not guilty of manslaughter for engaging in behavior that directly caused her daughter’s death because the injuries took place before the baby was born! Now, she probably did not intend for this to happen, but the court’s decision really highlights how far our culture has drifted from valuing unborn life. This baby had absolutely no rights, value, dignity, worth, or even basic respect in the eyes of the law simply because she had not yet been born. How utterly unjust! What’s going to be next—legal infanticide? After all, in this view, what’s the difference between a baby that hasn’t been born and a baby that has just been born? According to this view of life, absolutely nothing other than a change of location from in the womb to outside of the womb!

As I’ve said before regarding after-birth abortions, once a nation rejects the absolute authority of God’s Word—our foundation for morality—morality will be whatever you make it to be. And I have said many times in my public talks that once you are okay with killing babies inside the womb, it’s a very short step to killing babies outside the womb—and in our culture, which has no value for unborn life, it’s easily imaginable.

This is the direct product of a culture that has rejected God’s Word. America is saturated with evolutionary ideas, and generations of students have been taught they are nothing more than animals. And if we’re nothing more than animals, why should life have any value? In an evolutionary view there is no inherent worth, value, or dignity in simply being human because you’re nothing more than a highly evolved animal. As a recent evolutionary indoctrination Smithsonian traveling exhibit for public libraries illustrated—humans are related to bananas. In fact, from an evolutionary perspective, all life belongs to one big evolutionary tree—all life is related. Humans are related to tapeworms, to fruit flies, to chimps, to every living thing! Because our culture has bought this lie, we’ve seen the continuing devaluation of human life, both born and unborn.

It’s a biblical worldview that values human life—all human life. Each and every human being is “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14) in the very image of the Creator (Genesis 1:26–27). Human life has inherent value, dignity, and worth simply because it is human, because these things are endowed on us by our Creator. In a biblical worldview there is no arbitrary distinction between a person and a non-person simply because of a difference of location. An unborn human is just as much a person as a human who has been born. Human life begins at fertilization. Right at this point, the life has a unique combination of information, different from the father and mother, yet coming from them. No new information is then added! Humans are 100 percent human from the point of fertilization. Abortion is the killing of a human being made in the image of God.

You can learn more about the sanctity of life—all life—in this article or in our DVD set The Sanctity of Life. You can also read my recent article that highlights the similarities between child sacrifice in biblical days and the child sacrifice that is going on in abortion clinics today. Please share this article with others.

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
Ken

This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.