Published January 1, 2025
A deep frustration for older Americans in our tech-mediated world is the way in which the meanings of words we thought we understood just yesterday begin to signify something like their opposite. As the mother of three teenage boys, I experience this unsettling occurrence weekly. Take “disgusting” — a word commonly employed for centuries to signify aversion or displeasure. Circa 2020, according to various online sources (and my sons), “disgusting” in teen dialect somehow came to mean its literal opposite: “really cool.” But the relatively minor distress this teen wordplay gives me is nothing compared to the real instability our culture has experienced in the speedy transformation of basic terms like “woman” and “man.”
In the United States, the pro-life movement’s post-Roe losses at the ballot box over the past two years may well have as much to do with the instability of language as with being outspent by veritable blood money in every jurisdiction. Consider the word “abortion” itself: In the public mind — with the help of the powerful progressive media — “abortion” has come to mean anything from a morally licit lifesaving medical procedure that rescues the maternal patient but unintentionally loses the prenatal one, to a very intentional, elective ending of the unborn child’s nascent life.
As one whose professional work is to labor over ideas and their expression in law and policy, I’ve found this particular misunderstanding incredibly frustrating, especially when it’s the product of intentional misrepresentation. But Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), that great and prescient observer of democracy in America, suggested in his book by that name that the tendency to employ and then remake abstract terms is a feature of democracy itself. He writes, “As [those living in democratic countries] never know whether the idea they express to-day will be appropriate to the new position they may occupy to-morrow, they naturally acquire a liking for abstract terms. An abstract term is like a box with a false bottom: you may put in it what ideas you please, and take them out again without being observed.”
Now, the term abortion isn’t so abstract — or at least it shouldn’t be. But other key terms employed in the abortion debate very much are, and their meanings too are shifting, and have been over a much longer period.
In particular, the terms “person” and “rights” signify distinctive realities on either side of the abortion debate. Therefore, our work is not only about persuasion — or employing sweet reason to attract another to our way of seeing the world. It’s also the work of translation: We simply can no longer rely on “person” and “rights” as the verbal shortcuts they once were.
As such, a very short history of ideas is in order — first, to understand the origin of these two terms in the classical and Christian traditions (the worldview that has guided Western civilization for almost two millennia); and then, to understand their modern-day individualistic conceptions, especially in the way our historical moment tends to understand “women’s rights.” And from this, we can consider a path forward to communicate to our culture, transforming it into a culture of life.
RIGHTS AND DUTIES
In Roman law, to be a “person” was to enjoy a legal statusthat entailed both rights and responsibilities. Christians then universalized this classical view on the basis of the Book of Genesis. All human beings, not just those well born, are made in the image of God and thus enjoy the dignified status of “persons” (analogous to the Trinity of divine persons). The Western legal tradition, deeply informed by this account, defined human persons by their concrete and particular nature: We are fleshy, embodied beings who are individually endowed with awesome rational capacities. And we are each in a dependent relationship with our Creator and in interdependent relationships with concrete and particular others who are like us in all these ways. In this view, such embodied, interdependent human persons are owed respect and care, simply because they are created in God’s image. “Persons” then are those who are owed basic respect.
What, then, are “rights”? Rights was the name eventually given to what the person is concretely owed, or due. In the early Christian legal conception, there was only one word for rights and duties — ius, which is the root of justice — because rights and duties never exist independently of one another. They are the two sides of the same coin.
Let me make this explicit in the issue of abortion. In the traditional legal framework, a mother and father owe their unborn child duties of nurture and care simply because of the existential relation of dependency the vulnerable human child has with her parents. As such, the child has a correlative claim (“right”) on that care, or most basically, a right not to be killed. Just law recognizes these maternal and paternal duties and the child’s correlative rights as one and the same. When the law explicitly exempts, in cases of elective abortion, the natural (and legal) duties of nurture and protection that parents owe their children, it should be understood as a violation of an age-old concept embedded in our constitutional order — that the law must treat each and every person, whether rich or poor, low or mighty, without favor, and with “equal protection of the laws.”
This conception of rights and duties as tightly bound up with one another is the very conception to which the early American women’s rights advocates appealed in their own rights claims in the mid-19th century. This is why even the most radical of the 19th-century advocates — such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) and Victoria Woodhull (1838-1927) — were opposed to elective abortion, likening it to infanticide. It would have made no sense to them to think that a woman should have a “right” to intentionally end the life of her child, since the early women’s rights advocates sought their civil and political rights to better carry out their duties to their children, and beyond.
Indeed, these early advocates understood women to be mothers — with all the responsibilities of motherhood — not when their children were born, but from the time they began developing in their mothers’ wombs. Our nation’s earliest female doctors, for their part, knew the science of embryology and worked to ensure that ordinary women understood it, too. As Dr. Alice Bunker Stockham (1833-1912), one of the nation’s first female OB-GYNs, put it: “By what false reasoning does [a woman] convince herself that another life, still more dependent upon her for its existence, with equal rights and possibilities, has no claim upon her for protection?”
LOVE AND RESPONSIBILITY
Today, “persons” are no longer regarded as concrete and particular human beings owed respect and care. Rather, with the marked philosophical shift from Christian to secular humanism in the West, persons are now abstractly conceived as wholly independent, autonomous, self-determined consciousnesses who are carried around by their machine-like, manipulable bodies. Personal identity — the “I” the law should care about — is, in this paradigm, in the mind; the body, its sex and other essential features, is merely a tool employed by the I’s will.
In this disembodied mythical perspective, then, what are “rights”? They are no longer connected necessarily with particular responsibilities to concrete others. No, now rights are conceived as abstract liberties — protections from others who may impinge on my own self-concept, my own autonomy, my own self-determination and will.
In the context of abortion, then, the pregnant woman is, of course, a complete “person” with consciousness and self-determination. But because in this new paradigm she owns her body as a kind of tool or property, she is understood to enjoy an absolute right to exclude another, even employing the use of force as necessary against her own dependent child. This absolute right to bodily autonomy is the essence of “reproductive freedom,” the slogan used in several state referendums. And to many, unfortunately, it sounds very American.
Pro-lifers respond to all of this with, “But the unborn child has rights, too!” Yet, when “rights,” and freedom itself, have been redefined as self-making self-ownership in both the legal and cultural imagination, it’s very difficult for ordinary people to recognize “rights” in the dependent unborn child. After all, the tiny, still-developing unborn human being is not — at least until viability — “independent” of her mother, and so would not seem, in this property-rights paradigm, to “own herself,” to be a “person” worthy of “rights.”
This is all to say that in such a cultural and legal context, we just can’t assume that arguing the child is equally a “person” with a “right” to life has the kind of explanatory power it once did.
What, then, are we to do?
First, we should work to shift the debate out of the highly abstract context of competing “rights” claims. We can no longer simply assert, in the first instance, that the unborn child has a right to life. Rather, to translate that claim for our time, it is better to state that mothers and fathers owe duties of care to their vulnerable children — care that is proportionate to the child’s vulnerability, duties that are equal if distinctive between moms and dads. And as Catholic social teaching makes very clear, we ought also to insist that social institutions owe duties to the family — in terms of good family policy — to encourage and support the undertaking of these culturally essential (and very concrete and particular) maternal and paternal responsibilities. No individual, no family, is an island; we are interconnected and responsible to one another, interdependent parts of greater wholes.
I have found that when we invite fellow citizens — left, right and center — to think in these more concrete terms, they do tend still to believe that we human beings owe duties of care to one another: to the weaker, the dependent, the vulnerable, and especially to our own children. Indeed, if you ask them about the kind of people they think others ought to be, that they personally want to be, they still tend to value those who faithfully carry out their responsibilities. The mistrust of our institutions is due, in large part, to too many in authority abdicating their sacred duties.
We also need to resist falling into the “autonomy” frame of thinking by imaging the unborn child floating alone, independent of her mother and the rest of society, as though legal protection on its own could save the child. The very reality of the existential dependence of each child upon each mother — not to mention how readily one can find abortion pills — means that if we are truly going to protect unborn children, we are going to have to bring each and every pregnant woman on the side of her child’s life. And this means we are also going to have to bring each father to cherish both mother and child.
This is the really hard part. It is the sacred work of each Catholic man and woman, each family, each parish, each community: It means each of us working, very concretely, for a culture that is far more hospitable to, and encouraging of, family life. The Catholic Church recognizes the family as “the original cell of social life,” which “has a decisive responsibility [that] flows from its very nature as a community of life and love” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2207; Evangelium Vitae, 92).
To support a renewed flowering of family life, our responsibility to one another will have to extend beyond the needs of families to each and every person. To build a culture that truly values every human life, each of us has to learn, day by day, by God’s grace, to encounter each other — to be responsible for one another — as human persons who are owed love and respect simply by virtue of imaging the divine, a Trinity of persons united by Love.
EPPC Fellow Erika Bachiochi is a legal scholar who works at the intersection of constitutional law, political theory, women’s history, and Catholic social teaching. She is also the editor-in-chief of Fairer Disputations, the online journal of the Mercy Otis Warren Initiative for Women in Civic Life and Thought at the School for Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at ASU. She is a 2024–25 Fellow at the Nesti Center for Faith and Culture at the University of St. Thomas (Houston) where she is teaching a women’s history course in UST’s new Catholic Women and Gender Studies Program.
