Definitions matter.
Paxton Smith, valedictorian at Lake Highlands High School in Dallas, Texas, was given the platform at her graduation to offer her thoughts to the graduating class.
Her speech, promoting abortion rights against Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s ‘Heartbeat Bill’, was met with cheers from the crowd, and has since gone viral.
In it she said,
“I am terrified that if my contraceptives fail, I am terrified that if I am raped, then my hopes and aspirations and dreams and efforts for my future will no longer matter. I hope that you can feel how gut-wrenching that is. I hope you can feel how dehumanizing it is, to have the autonomy over your own body taken away from you.”
I can understand what she’s saying in this simple paragraph. If someone or something were able to intervene in her life, without her consent, and end her hopes, dreams and aspirations for the future, it would indeed be dehumanizing.
Her appeal makes perfect sense, and it is the very reason such legislation as the Heartbeat Bill are a great blessing to our nation, and to Texas.
The inconsistency in her thinking, of course, is the definition of ‘human’.
Paxton’s appeal makes sense for herself—she sees herself as a human, and therefore worthy of protection under the law. And she’s right. Her rights and freedoms should be protected.
The problem with her logic is how she views the child she might potentially be carrying. When that child is in her womb, she considers it to not be worthy of the rights she herself longs for, and in that sense, she dehumanizes that baby.
At that moment, the baby’s hopes, dreams, and aspirations for the future are meaningless. Someone could intervene in that baby’s life, without their consent, and bring those dreams to an immediate halt—not through the trauma of an unwanted birth, but through murder. While the baby may not be able to make a speech decrying this treatment, it might well make the same speech Paxton did, just 18 years later.
Paxton is correct in her demand for rights. The problem is that she has not gone far enough. She would only consider her own rights to humanitarian treatment, rather than the rights of all humans. I pray she’ll understand these definitions, and change her mind.
