Legal Battle over Frozen Embryos shows our Dehumanization of the Unborn

An actress and her ex-boyfriend are in a legal battle over two of their frozen embryos. She wants the embryos destroyed. Her boyfriend believes life begins at conception and thus views these embryos as his children (and rightly so). Thus, he wants to protect these human lives and give them a chance to be born. He has even said that he will assume all financial obligations and parental responsibility for the children and will not hold his ex-girlfriend responsible in any way.

The problem is that, due to abortion laws, embryos are not recognized as human beings. They aren't legal persons. Thus, an embryo is only considered property. Instead of prioritizing the life of these two little girls (they're female embryos) and giving them to the parent who wishes to care for them instead of kill them, the courts will most likely resolve the case based on property laws.

There are few things we can learn from this.

1. Don't create children with someone you're not married to or someone who doesn't value unborn life. In this case, the man believed life begins at fertilization and is against abortion. But he made the very bad choice to create children with a woman who disagrees with him. If she were pregnant with the children, he would have no recourse at all and it would be completely her choice whether or not to kill his children. So, men, if you don't want your children killed, don't make babies with pro-choice women.

Because the babies are not in the woman's body, the father has some chance of saving their lives, but the fact that this argument is even taking place is evidence that this was a very bad choice of a woman to breed with. His children may yet be killed because their mother does not want them to exist.

2. Abortion laws have not only allowed the killing of millions of innocent children, but they have caused us to reduce unborn human lives to mere property. Think of the dehumanization of two people arguing over possession of these two children as if they were arguing over the furniture after a break-up. And the law sees these children as property and will rule accordingly. The needs of the children are never considered. The lives of the children are never seen as worth saving.

3. You know, this case reminds me of a similar legal battle that once happened in the Bible. Only in that case, there were two women fighting over a child they both claimed. The wise king Solomon offered to divide the "property" in half by killing the child and cutting his body in two to give half to each woman. The real mother stood up and pleaded with the king to spare the child, even if she had to give him to the other woman. King Solomon knew the real mother would care about her child and save his life above all else and thus he determined which woman had the rightful claim. The woman who held the child's life sacred was the one who should have him.

In this case, the issue is similarly clear. One parent wishes to destroy the frozen embryos while the other wants to save their lives and care for them. Let us hope the judge will be as wise as Solomon and give the children into the custody of their father.

Unfortunately, because of the legality of abortion, the law dictates that the judge should not be wise in protecting the lives of the unborn children, but that he should treat the children as property to be evenly divided, even at the expense of their lives. This is a deep flaw in our law that we must address in order to protect the lives of children.

4. It is a sad state of affairs when we have a culture that rightly hates slavery and looks back upon our history of enslaving an entire people group with revulsion and horror and yet, apparently, cannot see that we are doing the exact same thing with a different group of people. We have dehumanized the unborn and turned them into legal property to be kept or discarded at the whim of the "owner" just as we did for blacks in the days of slavery. It was a shame then and it is a shame now. It must stop. We have to recognize and protect the inherent human rights of all human beings, regardless of race, age, gender, disability, or location.