A Modest Proposal: On the Windfall Owed to America’s Elders, and Other Logical Consequences of Personhood at Conception

The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel – CC BY 2.5

“Adam was an Onanist.”

— Graffiti, men’s restroom, Vatican City (public wing)

“I know. I watched.”

— Added below, in gold marker

Woman, we are told, began as a spare ribbon of flesh — all too willing to be seduced by the first dark and handsome horny lad that came along, and blamed for it ever since. (Melania, the First Lady, immediately called a press conference to deny that she had slept with the devil. She was not believed.)

Two thousand years of theology, and another fifty of American jurisprudence, have been devoted to making sure she pays for it. The Supreme Court, in its wisdom, has now formalized the arrangement: life begins at conception, the lawyers have spoken, and the womb is once again public property. The women of America received this news with the equanimity one might expect of people who have been a spare ribbon of flesh since the Old Testament.

But in their enthusiasm for the logical implications of conception-personhood, the Court appears to have overlooked certain other logical implications. We humbly submit them here, as a public service.

Consider, first, the matter of Social Security. If life begins at conception, then every American currently drawing benefits has been systematically cheated out of nine months of payments. The womb, under the old dispensation, was treated as a juridical dead zone — a liminal non-space where personhood accrued no entitlements whatsoever. This was, we can now see clearly, a scandal. Roughly 70 million Americans are owed nine months of back-payments at current benefit rates. The arithmetic is straightforward. The paperwork is available at ssa.gov. We suggest filing immediately, in bulk, with a note in the comments field referencing Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization as the controlling authority.

(The AARP did not respond to requests for comment. God did not respond either — at which point we remembered we had killed Him, and immediately filed for survivors’ benefits.)

The implications do not stop there. Every pregnancy is now, legally speaking, a dependent. Women who miscarried in prior tax years are owed amended returns. The IRS has not commented. Fertility clinics, which routinely destroy embryos in the ordinary course of business, are now presiding over mass casualty events of staggering proportions. FEMA has been notified. And since persons in utero must presumably be counted for congressional apportionment purposes, red states have been systematically undercounting their populations for decades. The Census Bureau is overwhelmed. Several constitutional amendments may require revision. We await guidance.

And then there is the matter of circumcision — raised here not in anger but in the spirit of logical housekeeping. Circumcision, we are told, was a gift from the Hebrews — a sensible hygienic practice elevated into sacred covenant. One notes, with the tenderness of a historian, that all it ultimately produced aesthetically was the helmet of a Nazi Germany. One more reason, perhaps, to shake a fist at the ceiling. The same legislators who are deeply exercised about medical procedures performed on non-consenting persons in the womb appear entirely unbothered by irreversible elective surgery performed on non-consenting infant males. We merely observe the inconsistency. We do not expect it to be resolved.

But the ceiling, as we have established, is empty. The Sistine ceiling shows the finger extended, the gesture of creation — and on the other end, nothing. Just fists, raised toward an empty sky.

We are all owed a reckoning. File your claims accordingly.

The post A Modest Proposal: On the Windfall Owed to America’s Elders, and Other Logical Consequences of Personhood at Conception appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Kendall Hawkins.

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