Right now there is a global effort taking place to give nature the very rights that preborn humans don’t even have. According to Pachamama.org, nature should be valued as a “living being.” This includes the right to exist and live free from cruel treatment. In addition, nature would have the right to “maintain vital processes necessary for the harmonious balance that supports all life.”
According to the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, in 2008, Ecuador became the first country to add rights for nature to its constitution. Then in 2010, a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth was announced at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change in Bolivia. Cities and towns in the United States have even enacted rights for nature. The trend continues to spread across the globe.
It’s all good and well to take care of our environment. It’s hard to argue in favor of pollution and destruction of nature. But how can we possibly give rights to the environment that humans have yet to be granted? Actual humans – alive – and tucked inside their mother’s womb – are denied existence, cruelly killed through dismemberment or poisoning, and denied the very things they need in order to live – nourishment from their mother. Yet fields of grass now get protection from these very acts, and constitutional rights as well?
If nature is soon given these rights as a living being, it will no longer be considered property, but a “rights bearing subject with standing in a court of law.” In order words, nature would have the right to exist, the right to grow, and the right to thrive. Land would not be property. But preborn humans still would be.
Trees and preborn humans are both living things and are both worthy of protection.
But do trees bleed when they are killed?
Do trees feel pain when their limbs are ripped off?
Are preborn humans “rights bearing subjects” in the eyes of the law?
Are preborn human lives protected and allowed to exist, grow and thrive?
Each day thousands of preborn humans are considered non-existent, and killed and tossed into medical waste bins or disposed of in dumpsters. They have no rights. No free will. In the eyes of the law, they are property to be cruelly treated without a second thought. Denied the right to grow up to be a lawyer who represents a tree in a court house. Yet that tree, will be treated with respect. That tree will have a lawyer fighting for its right to live.
At least in Ecuador and Bolivia preborn children are offered some level of protection. But in the United States, it seems trees could soon trump humans.
