Under Iran’s Shiite Islamic theocracy, the machinery of the state has assumed the authority to declare a human being worthy of death — and once the law sanctions the killing, the regime calls it justice. Thus, Iran has executed at least 916 people since January. Among those sent to the gallows are young freedom fighters condemned for their role in the January uprising against tyranny.
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Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Courts can impose death sentences for offenses framed in Islamic-law terms such as moharebeh, or “waging war against God,” and efsad-e fel-arz, commonly translated as “corruption on earth.” The Iranian state establishes the criteria, the courts apply the punishment, and human life loses the protection of the law.
In some public executions, the condemned are bound, a noose placed around their neck, and their bodies hoisted several stories into the air by construction cranes. Without the long drop intended to break the neck, death can instead come slowly by strangulation.
Horrific, right?
Here at home, in civilized America, thank God, we are far removed from such savagery — right?
In Massachusetts, Governor Maura Healey recently signed H.5595, the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act, eliminating the state’s previous statutory 24-week abortion framework and replacing it with language allowing an abortion to be performed based upon the physician’s professional judgment. Serial killer Kermit Gosnell was a doctor, too.
In Massachusetts, the machinery of the state has assumed the authority to declare a human being worthy of death — and once the law sanctions the killing, the governor calls it “access to care.” Sound familiar?
When it comes to abortion, the driving factors are obviously different from executions in Iran, but, at least for me, the underlying moral question is the same. Like Iran, those with more power and authority have a legal means of deciding when another human life may be deliberately ended.
One regime displays its handiwork either within the private confines of a prison or more openly in a public square; the other cloaks what it sanctions in the sterile language of health care and hides its dastardly acts in a tiled operating room.
So no, Maura Healey is not Iran’s supreme leader, an abortion facility is not Alikhani Square, and an unborn child is not a political dissident. The comparison is the principle.
Who gets to decide when an innocent human life no longer merits the protection of the law? When does something inherently wrong become right merely because a court in Iran declares it legal to take a life in order to suppress dissent, or a legislature passes a bill, and a smiling governor — surrounded by gleeful sycophants — signs it? When a political dissident is hanged from an Iranian crane, the death is legal, and in Massachusetts, when a late-term fetus is aborted and unnaturally extracted from the womb, the death is also legal.
Human rights advocates recoil in disgust when Iran creates legal categories under which human beings can be subjected to a gruesome death. Yet in civilized Massachusetts, the law now contains no specified cutoff for abortion.
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In addition to hanging, Iranian law authorizes other brutal punishments, including stoning and crucifixion. In America, sanitized medical terminology attempts to obscure what a late-term abortion can entail. Cue the smiling ladies standing around Maura Healey’s desk as she signs death warrants.
The larger issue is that location does not determine humanity. Passing through the birth canal does not magically transform one species into another. Neither does size, dependency, wantedness, or whether the law recognizes a person’s right to continue living based on that person’s political or religious views.
Humans are human before birth and remain human afterward.
In some states, abortions are performed at or after viability. Fetal cardiac activity may first be stopped with drugs such as potassium chloride, lidocaine, or digoxin before the abortion is completed. This is sort of like when victims of Iran’s political crackdown were placed in black body bags and lined up like garbage in the street. In America, a fully formed, viable unborn child can be killed, delivered, and relegated to a red biohazard bag and dragged to the crematorium.
Visuals like that depict the danger of blurring the lines between legality and morality. If human worth is inherent, governments cannot bestow it — and governments cannot take it away.
A Shiite Islamic theocracy can legalize barbarism. Courts can sign off on it. Crowds can smile and applaud as innocent people swing from construction cranes high above the street. Rewording or religiousizing can sanitize the horror. But none of those efforts addresses the fundamental moral question of whether anyone has the right to take a human life and justify it simply because it is legal.
Has the esteemed Governor Healey thought about the potential beast she’s unleashed and how what she’s smiling about today may cause her and her cadre of like-minded devotees to one day shed tears? What principle can a person invoke to establish his own inviolable right to life if he has already accepted that his judgment can determine whether another person deserves the right to life? Maybe someone should tell her that either human worth is inherent or bestowed, but it cannot be both.
The dilemma is that anyone who justifies the murder of the unborn, based on the whim of a mother and a willing accomplice in a doctor, does not have the moral authority to criticize what goes on in barbaric regimes like Iran.
Maybe Governor Healey should consider that once human worth is treated as something other human beings may confer or withdraw, the principle used against the unborn can theoretically be used against every human being, including herself.
If the day ever comes when sharia law arrives on American soil, those who supported the unfettered slaughter of the unborn will all have the potential to understand what it feels like to hear applause when a theocratic court of law sentences the arbiters of death to death themselves.
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Image via Pxfuel.