We once had philosophers as our elected officials, first-rate intellectuals like John Adams, James Madison, and Abraham Lincoln, whose learned writings and speeches reveal profound moral depth. Disagree with them where you will, but their minds are worthy of respect.
Now contrast those intellectual titans with remarks made by Michigan Democrat and Congressman Shri Thaneder: “My favorite kind of abortion is the kind that’s safe, legal, accessible, and none of your damn business to regulate. And no amount of fearmongering by describing what goes on to a half-ounce fetus with no consciousness, self-awareness, or feeling of pain is going to change that.”
Thaneder’s astounding remarks came in the aftermath of a galling exchange between Rep. Brandon Gill and a pro-abortion professor testifying in Congress. That short, two-minute exchange is worth watching in full, especially as Rep. Gill questions the professor on what would be her “favorite” method of abortion, from which he proceeds to describe in gory detail what different abortion procedures entail.
Rep. Gill presents only facts in the exchange. And the fact that these facts are evaded by this “expert in U.S. reproductive rights law and policy,” who squirms in unease, evades the questions, and euphemizes the procedure, demonstrates modernity’s seared conscience. But naming the grisly nature of abortion, as Rep. Gill did, provides a public service in laying bare what abortion actually is.
It is into that maelstrom that Rep. Thaneder’s horrific remarks came in defense of the professor. Notice how Thaneder justifies abortion by applying a criterion of human worth extrinsic to the question of the unborn child’s nature as a human being. According to his logic and the logic of all pro-abortion arguments, it is a set of actualized capacities that determine when a life is “unworthy of life” (to use the famous Nazi phrase).
By his calculation, size and sentience are the primary criteria that determine a person’s right to life. But by that criterion, one must ask Rep. Thaneder whether an 18-month-old toddler is less deserving of life than a three-year-old, and whether the three-year-old’s life is expendable compared to that of an 18-year-old teenager. And what about individuals in a coma, whose self-awareness and sentience are halted or suspended? Questions of size, development, environment, and dependency are extrinsic to the question of whether the unborn child is a member of the human community. Embryology has once and for all settled that question in the affirmative.
Once we violate the sacred principle that innocent life shall not be taken, there are no logical safeguards that prevent life from being taken elsewhere for other reasons. The single question in the abortion debate, according to legal theorist Michael Stokes Paulsen, always comes back to a central feature: “Everything turns on whether the living, unborn human child in utero is a separate, living human being possessing a moral status as such, so that killing him or her is the same as killing a born human child. If the living, unborn child is a living human being, morally entitled to be treated as such, nothing else matters.” Paulsen’s comments reduce the debate to a zero-sum reality: If a human being is the same human being at all stages of his or her existence, what right is there to kill a less developed human being that could not also warrant the death of someone at a later stage? Life and death hang in the balance in how that question is answered. That’s the precariousness of what the modern left hinges upon.
Once again, we see the logic of the pro-abortion movement laid bare: It is not membership in the human species that confers moral worth on human beings, but an extrinsic list of capacities that must be actualized for human dignity to inhere.
How totally opposed are the principles of human dignity that flow from Scripture and natural law.
The Christian principle of human worth is this: Every human being—regardless of any distinguishing classification or whether a particular human capacity is ever fully actualized—bears God’s image and possesses innate, irrevocable, and immeasurable dignity.
Sound social order requires a sound account of the human person so that their foundational premise—the existence of the person and the existence of the political community—is secure. One of the obligations of society, then, is to respect the nature of the human being in law.
As Princeton’s Robert P. George said in response to Thaneder: “We have our dignity and basic rights—human rights—in virtue of our humanity, not age, size, or stage of development, anymore than race, sex, or ethnicity. Human dignity is inherent, not acquired. All of us have it, and we have it from the point at which we come into being; we do not lose it except by ceasing to be (i.e., by dying). On this principle—that of the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family—all else depends. It is the foundational principle of justice. If we abandon it, then all other claims of justice are rendered arbitrary.”
It’s worth laying out first principles because when I see the modern progressive movement shift from “safe, legal, rare” to “shout your abortion,” or when members of Congress demonstrate callous disregard for human life, such a shift needs to be named for what it aims to accomplish: the narrowing of the law’s protective canopy over human life.
Reflect on the irony of this.
The modern progressive movement purportedly exists to expand “rights” endlessly for any number of identities or experiences. Yet, when it comes time to protect the one population that is the most voiceless and most vulnerable, modern progressivism restricts and denies legal protection to those most in need of it.
That is evidence of a profoundly inconsistent and crippled worldview. Christ can free us from such bankrupt thinking. But until human dignity means more to our society than the right to exercise one’s sexual autonomy, or more than the encumbrances that come with caring for all human beings, our society will rest on a faulty and deadly anthropology.
While Rep. Thaneder’s conscience is seared and he, too, lacks the self-awareness to understand how superficial and simplistic his arguments are, we still insist that he is made in God’s image and possesses innate, irrevocable, and immeasurable dignity. The question is why he refuses to do the same moral math and apply that to all human beings. Of course, we know the answer to that: The modern Democratic Party is wholly indebted to a culture of autonomy above all else, even above human dignity.
A lawyer friend of mine on X responded to my critique of Rep. Thaneder’s response with a chilling observation that Rep. Thaneder’s form of governance is “Government of the ghoulish, by the ghoulish, and for the ghoulish.” That’s exactly what it is.
This article originally appeared at WORLD Opinions on May 1, 2026.
