A Person’s a Person No Matter How Small

By Ken DeGraaf | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice

This story is not merely about a brave young girl gone viral for a poignant poem.

It is about a canary in a coal mine gasping for air as the poisons of a culture increasingly unable to tolerate truth swirl ever thicker in the atmosphere around it.

When a 7th grader is barred from presenting a poem titled “A life is a life, no matter how small” to her Honors English classmates because it defended unborn life, Colorado should take stock of its condition. In a Jeffco district claiming that “all students…feel that their voices and perspectives are valued,” the promotion of life itself was deemed too offensive.

A healthy civilization does not fear competing moral arguments. It does not silence peaceful dissent or require institutional gatekeepers to shield its assumptions from scrutiny.

The irony is hard to miss: the poem’s title echoes the sentiment of another woke-cancelled author — Dr. Seuss.

When a society becomes incapable of permitting discussion about the humanity of its most vulnerable members, it reveals not confidence in its moral position, but fear of confronting it honestly. 

The state insists young people are mature enough to make irreversible sexual and reproductive decisions, yet supposedly too fragile to hear a peaceful moral argument about unborn life. That contradiction exposes the real objective: not education, but indoctrination.

Colorado stands at a crossroads.

The question is whether we still believe the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence are objectively true — or merely convenient slogans invoked when politically useful.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal… endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…”

That language established that rights do not come from government. Rights are recognized by government, not granted by it.

Yet Colorado increasingly embraces the opposite premise: that the state determines which humans qualify for legal protection.

Colorado law simultaneously acknowledges the biological humanity of the unborn child while denying independent personhood and rights. An unborn child may be wanted, named, celebrated, and loved one moment — yet possess no legal protection the next if deemed unwanted.

Science settled the biological question decades ago. The remaining philosophical debate is whether all humans qualify as persons.

Traditionally, a person has been understood as a human being — body and soul together. If society rejects the existence of the soul entirely, then the question becomes simpler—“human” then defines “person.”

Indeed, if personhood is synonymous with humanity, then the Fifth Amendment could be rewritten as: “No human shall be deprived of life… without due process of law.”

Yet Colorado increasingly creates an exception whereby an entire class of biologically human beings may be intentionally deprived of life not only without due process, but without legal recognition that any deprivation occurred at all.

But if human life possesses significance beyond biology alone, then the stakes become infinitely higher. The deliberate destruction of innocent human life is no longer merely political, but moral. If there is no Creator, there are no Creator-endowed rights.

Rights are funny things. They are either “all for one,” or eventually “none for all.”

Once society accepts that rights may be denied to one innocent class of humans, no other right remains secure.

Abraham Lincoln warned precisely about this danger during the conflict over slavery:

“I read once in a law book, ‘A slave is a human being who is legally not a person but a thing.’ And if the safeguards to liberty are broken down… when they have made things of all the free negroes, how long… before they will begin to make things of poor white men?”

Lincoln understood the danger was not merely slavery itself, but the principle behind it: that government may redefine some humans as non-persons for the convenience of the powerful.

And every day feticide goes unchallenged, it is tacitly endorsed.

Too many Americans — including too many churches — have adopted “intentional neutrality.” But there is no neutral ground where innocent human life is concerned. Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned that silence in the face of evil is itself participation in it.

For years, many citizens comforted themselves that abortion was regrettable but distant, legal but private, immoral but outside their responsibility. Amendment 79 and SB25-183 shattered that illusion.

The public was assured Amendment 79 would have “no fiscal impact.” Yet even the ballot language acknowledged future legislatures could create taxpayer-funded abortion programs later.

Before the ink on Amendment 79 was even dry, Democrat lawmakers were crafting legislation ensuring Colorado taxpayers would fund elective abortion by any means, for any reason, at any stage of pregnancy.

SB25-183 quickly followed, and its fiscal analysis discussed governmental savings from “averted births.”

That phrase should alarm every citizen regardless of political affiliation. Once government begins calculating human beings primarily as future fiscal liabilities, human lives become entries on a balance sheet.

Colorado law now imposes effectively no gestational limits and few substantive restrictions. Third-trimester procedures remain protected while enabling the harvesting of the most developmentally mature fetal tissues.

Once government adopts the premise that some innocent lives are financially preferable not to exist, the principle rarely remains confined.

Colorado taxpayers are now compelled to subsidize the destruction of preborn human life. Public dollars flow toward a system that treats unborn children as disposable and profitable — a modern temple tax offered to the ancient idols of Molech and Baal and their insatiable demand for child sacrifice.

As much as euphemisms attempt to obscure reality, every pregnancy ends the same way — with a baby, dead or alive. Over 99% were consensually conceived.

Natural fetal death often carries profound grief and trauma. Intentionally induced fetal death — whether through dismemberment, suffocation, starvation, chemical burning, or induced exsanguination — can compound that trauma still further.

Yet informed consent, which should require honesty about the physical, psychological, and moral realities involved, is too often treated as an obstacle rather than a safeguard.

Pregnancy permanently alters a woman biologically, neurologically, hormonally, and emotionally. Through feto-maternal microchimerism, maternal cells help develop the child while cells from the child may remain in the mother’s body for decades, sometimes for life.

In a literal biological sense, part of the child remains with the mother — and part of the mother dies with her terminated child.

The body remembers. The mind remembers. The endocrine system remembers.

Institutions increasingly shield young people from hearing moral objections while encouraging a culture that treats procreation primarily as recreation, detached from permanence, responsibility, and the creation of human life itself.

Anthropologist J.D. Unwin, after studying civilizations across thousands of years, concluded that societies severing sexuality from permanence, responsibility, and procreation consistently lose the cohesion and moral confidence necessary to endure.

A culture treating procreation as recreation should not be surprised when it eventually begins treating children themselves as optional burdens rather than blessings.

And once a society normalizes the destruction of inconvenient human life, it should not be surprised when truth itself becomes inconvenient as well.

A culture may suppress dissent, redefine words, stigmatize moral objections, and insulate itself from inconvenient truths.

But reality remains undefeated.

You can ignore the truth, but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring the truth.

History is filled with civilizations convinced moral laws could be suspended indefinitely in service of appetite, ideology, or power. None escaped the consequences.

We see this in Colorado’s broader political trajectory as well. Despite years of economic growth, lawmakers consumed surpluses as though abundance were inexhaustible, then answered looming deficits with demands for still more spending, taxation, borrowing, and centralized control.

Like a swarm of locusts descending upon fertile land, the architects of this modern death-cult devour what earlier generations built — consuming prosperity while producing dependency, division, and decline. Businesses flee. Workers depart. Families seek refuge elsewhere in search of affordability, opportunity, and freedom.

Why would we expect a government with no regard for life to reliably protect liberty or the pursuit of happiness?

Colorado must decide what kind of society it intends to become.

Whether rights are truly unalienable, or merely permissions granted by power.

Whether personhood is inherent, or politically assigned.

Whether life is a right to be protected, or a liability to be managed.

Whether truth itself still deserves a hearing.

Because once a civilization learns to deny the humanity of one class of innocent people, the poison never remains contained. It spreads outward into every institution touched by power, ideology, convenience, and fear.

The bell that tolls for the unborn does not toll for them alone.

And as we were warned centuries ago: “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Rep. Ken DeGraaf represents House District 22 in northeast Colorado Springs and has served in the Colorado House since 2023. He’s a 27-year U.S. Air Force veteran and pilot, a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and holds a master’s in structural dynamics from Columbia University.

 

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.