What are Women’s Rights?
A woman who survived a late-term abortion asked this question: “If abortion is about women’s rights, then what were mine?” Gianna Jessen recently addressed the House Judiciary Committee with this question. She survived a saline abortion, a process that burns the unborn child from the inside out.
Years after Jessen’s survival, in other news, a woman admitted to killing her 4-year-old daughter. 25-year-old Stacie Parsons walked into a Texas Police Department and confessed to the murder of her child. Did she have the right to kill her daughter?
What is the difference between these two stories? Most people would agree that the murdered 4-year-old girl had been wrongly stripped of her rights. Yet, many are not so sure about the baby girl in the first story who survived the abortion. At what age do women’s rights become valid? When does it count?
To answer that, we must look at the basic definition of human rights. What gives you specific legal, constitutional, and human rights? Can you punch the person in line in front of you? What if they are in your way, cutting you off, keeping you from what you need?
A human right, by definition, cannot infringe on someone else’s rights.
If you must strip someone of their rights to claim your own, then quite simply, you have no right to it. Those are not human rights; those are thug rights.
Women’s rights don’t count when it causes abuse, tyranny, or violence to another person.
When Jessen’s body was placed on a table after surviving the abortion, she says, “Thankfully, the abortionist was not at work yet. Had he been there, he would have ended my life with strangulation, suffocation, or leaving me there to die. Instead, a nurse called an ambulance, and I was rushed to a hospital. Doctors did not expect me to live.”
Though it is rare, when aborted babies are born alive, it is routine for doctors to finish the job. Strangulation, suffocation, and neglect are the norm. A fully formed baby, Jessen’s fragile life should have been snuffed out had things gone according to procedure. Did she have any rights then? When would her rights have officially “counted?” At the age of 2 or 3?
Why is killing a healthy baby a woman’s right… How is it even being considered?
My Body, My Choice.
Even on the face of it, this easy, widespread Planned Parenthood slogan is not valid. It is a manifest contradiction in terms—a non sequitur. It is not your body; it is someone else’s. Jessen’s body was not her mother’s; it was hers–even while experiencing a gruesome saline abortion.
What Are Women’s Rights?
The truth is God defines what makes something a “right” and what does not.
But biblical truths are counterintuitive. Today, women are shouting out their rights, thinking this will make them happy and free. In the Bible, freedom always comes from giving your life away, not grabbing after it. When you seek after your life and your rights, you lose them. When you give them away, even as Christ gave His life away, you find them (Luke 17:33)
Giving birth to a child is indeed a way of giving up your life in one sense. But if we understand it rightly, we will recognize a mysterious truth: real freedom comes by laying down your life for the sake of another. A sacrifice so that your baby girl can have the opportunity to live–the freedom to experience bedtime snuggles, taste ice cream, and the chance to follow her dreams.
