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By Dennis Byrne
University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey R. Stone objected to President George W. Bush's veto of funding for embryonic stem cell research because it's not worthwhile protecting human life that's "smaller than a period on this page."
From this we should conclude that the comparative worth of human life is determined by size. The smaller you are, the fewer human rights you get; when you're the size of a dot and you have none. That's bad news for shorties. Stone, writing in an op-ed column for the Chicago Tribune, never gets around to saying how big a person must get before being endowed with the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Years ago, I was discussing this point with a liberal editorial board colleague at the Chicago Sun-Times. She insisted that a woman's "reproductive rights" trumped any fetal rights because "it" wasn't yet a person. So, I asked, when did you become a person? Her pause indicated an intellectual void on the topic, until the answer came to her with sudden and absolute clarity. "Well, at birth," she proclaimed. She reasoned that at birth the fetus no longer is intimately dependent on the woman.
From this we are to conclude that the comparative worth of human life is defined by the degree of dependency. Which isn't good news for the developmentally disabled, the failing elderly and even newborns.
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