Soylent Green is People

“Soylent Green is people!”

The movie Soylent Green ends with the plea that people be told this truth–that the remains of people are being turned into food for the rest of the population. The ending leaves you room to hope that something will change as a result of this revelation. But it also leaves you reason to believe that no-one will listen to this grim, unpleasant message. What would they do?

I rather suspect that the majority, hearing this declaration, chose to believe instead reassuring official voices that told them the claims were overblown, the evidence fabricated, and even if the processed food were made of people, why should we allow all of that protein to go to waste when there are people dying every day?

That is, after all, the response to our modern-day dystopic realities.

Soylent Green is people? “Fetal tissue” is people.

I’ve been watching combox warriors arguing over the source of the videos showing Planned Parenthood employees apparently negotiating the sale of fetal body parts. They argue about the extent to which the videos are or aren’t edited (no tech wizard has yet found telltale marks of manipulation on the “unedited” versions). They argue about the legality of tissue donation and the ethics of inflating handling costs for “donations” and whether the mothers gave informed consent.

But all of this misses the real crux of the thing, which is this: fetal tissue is human remains. Fetuses are people. Whether or not they are currently recognized as such. And that we do not recognize the humanity of the unborn is not a result of our enlightened modern nature–it is a relic of a barbaric protectionism that ranks the humanity of different groups by how likely they are to use the resources we desire for ourselves, or how much use we can make of them.


The movement of modern liberal society has been towards extending kinship further, turning out-groups into in-groups, recognizing the humanity of groups when it had previously been more convenient, useful, economically and socially advantageous to deny that humanity. This has been a courageous movement because each extension of humanity, of rights, of dignity and worth has cost the more-dominant groups. Each extension of in-group status threatens those who are newly come to the in-group and feel insecure in their place and challenges the norms and power base of the dominant members of the in-group. Each extension takes a tremendous amount of moral courage.

Abortion has been a horrific exception to that movement, a step back justified as a necessary bloody step up for women, an answer to living in a man’s world that allowed men to continue to make the rules for equality that women would now sacrifice their children and their integrity to try to live by.