An Argentinian court ruled this week that a orangutan named Sandra should receive some of the same legal rights as human beings, according to the BBC.
The court decided that while the 20-year-old animal was not a human being, she is a “person” who deserves certain legal rights, according to the report. Lawyers for the orangutan argued that she was being illegally detained in the Buenos Aires zoo and that she had “probable cognitive capability,” the BBC reported.
The court ruled in the orangutan’s favor, allowing her to be transferred to an animal sanctuary in Brazil, the report states.
While animals deserve to be treated humanely, the case is a reminder of the diminishing rights across the world for certain groups of human beings. While courts focus on giving rights to animals, every day tens of thousands of babies in the womb are aborted world-wide and denied the right to life.
Reports estimate anywhere between 12.4 million and 54 million unborn babies are aborted every year around the world. One researcher estimated that there have been approximately 1.72 billion abortions world-wide in the past 40 years.
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Pro-life countries like Northern Ireland, Poland and many in South America are under constant attack by abortion activists. Planned Parenthood, for example, spent $137 million to promote abortions across the globe in 2014; the abortion business especially targeted countries where unborn babies’ rights are recognized and abortion is prohibited.
Pro-abortion forces also have been using international entities like the United Nations to put pressure on pro-life nations to change their laws and deny unborn babies their rights as human beings.
As bioethicist Wesley Smith once noted, “[H]uman beings are much more than the mere sum of our parts and functions. … We are moral and intellectual beings with the ability to create, civilize, project over time, and transcend.”
Smith pointed out that our society is granting rights to animals “at the same time that we are diminishing the perceived moral worth of the developmentally and cognitively disabled among us, and indeed, adding to the list of humans that make up our disposable caste.”
