White House Recognizes Unborn as Full Human Beings

The White House Visitors Office requires that an unborn child—still residing in utero—must be counted as a full human being when its parents register for a White House tour, according to documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.


As Elizabeth Scalia notes on her Anchoress blog, White House Visitors Office director Ellie Schafer sent an email to a Capitol Hill staffer Tuesday morning explaining the process for registering an unborn fetus for a White House tour:

We have received a number of calls regarding how to enter security information for a baby that has not yet been born.

Crazy as it may sound, you MUST include the baby in the overall count of guests in the tour. It’s an easy process.

You have to count your unborn child as a full human being if you want to tour the White House.  In case you missed it, Ms. Schafer uses the term baby twice in two sentences, not fetus, not clump of tissue, but baby.

I just think it’s good that the answer to this question is fully, finally, and forever, on the record, by the authority of the White House Visitors Office: an unborn child is a full human being.

It follows, therefore, that abortion is the willful killing of a full human being. A full, whole human being, not an abstraction.  

Let us hope and pray that this realization at the White House spreads from the Visitors Office to the President's Office.  But recognizing the full humanity of the child in the womb does not necessarily lead all to the conclusion that killing her is wrong.  So according to the Visitors Office, unborn babies are full human beings, but according to the President you can kill them at will.  Well, that's roughly ethicist Peter Singer's position.  He holds both positions at the same time.  The White House is not so consistent or transparent in its endorsement of evil.