God-Given Rights 

Last week, journalist Heidi Przybyla of Politico caused a stir when she expressed grave concern about “Christian Nationalists,” those whom she says “believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come any earthly authority. They [believe our rights] don’t come from Congress, they don’t come from the Supreme Court, [rather] they come from God.” Responding, Bishop Robert Barron noted that the Declaration of Independence says that all human beings “are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights,” an explicit acknowledgement that God is the source of human rights.  Barron argued that “it is exceptionally dangerous when we forget the principle that our rights come from God and not from a government.” For, if our rights were the creation of society or of the government, then those rights would always be subject to change and could be taken away. Moreover, without reference to God as the source of our rights, social policies always end up favoring the strong over the weak. With nothing transcendent to check the will of the powerful, they will always seek to promote their own interests at the expense of those without power. 

While this debate over the source of human rights was taking place, the Supreme Court of Alabama issued a decision in a case that was, according to NPR, “brought by couples whose frozen embryos were destroyed in an accident at a fertility clinic in Mobile, Ala.” An embryo, of course, is a human life at its earliest stage of development. Each one of us was once an embryo, just as we were once an infant and an adolescent. The court’s ruling acknowledged that human embryos have legal and moral status that would allow parents to seek damages against the fertility clinic for the wrongful deaths of their children under a state statute. The philosopher and bioethicist Charles Camosy notes that, “predictably, most of the objections to this ruling have focused not on the powerless population, but rather on the supposed consequences for those who benefit from IVF.  If you think that’s limited to hopeful parents, you’re not seeing the profits going to corporate biotech, which relies on massive numbers of ‘excess’ human beings being indefinitely frozen, killed via research or simply being discarded like trash. It would be difficult to come up with a better example of what Pope Francis describes as our technocratic ‘throwaway culture.’” 

This, the Church would say, is the foreseeable result of the separation of procreation from the sexual act between a man and woman, that the new human life will be treated as a commodity rather than a gift, its value being determined by market forces. But every child, no matter the circumstances of his/her conception, is a creature made in God’s image and endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. These rights might be inconvenient. They might prevent us from doing the things we want to do. But that, of course, is the point. 

posted 3/2/24