It sounds like satire: “The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a fetus is a body part, akin to teeth, skin and hair that are eventually shed.” But it's all too real, from a May 7 Associated Press story that tells of a man convicted for attempting an amateur abortion on his unwitting fiancée.

Who knows what future anthropologists will make of such a report. They may think they stumbled upon a time warp.

If they compare the report to our time's advances in medical knowledge, they may think that the Connecticut Supreme Court unaccountably reverted to pre-medieval biology.

It's true that women and their children, especially while they reside in the womb, are intimately linked in a unique relationship, a dependent symbiosis that breaks down many of the barriers that ordinarily demarcate where one person stops and another begins. They share blood; their immune systems “turn off" so as not to attack each other; a poison injected, eaten, or smoked by the mother will harm the child.

But even in medieval times, an unborn child was known to be just that — another person — and birth has never been considered an “amputation.”

If future historians analyze the Connecticut Supreme Court with legal development in mind, they will find that our laws are profoundly confused, a hodge-podge of incompatible assumptions about the nature of human beings, their rights and duties. But in one respect, they may find the decision a throwback to ancient times.

In medieval English common law, which gradually Christianized the pagan customs of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, a wife was considered (all-too-literally) a part of her husband. In fact, the moment she married, she lost virtually all property rights, becoming in effect his “chattel.” (The root of the word, “cattle,” refers to any moveable piece of property.)

Because of this intimate relationship, a woman could not be called to testify against her husband — since it would constitute self-incrimination.

Most egregiously, there was no provision for punishing marital rape or most forms of spousal abuse. The metaphor of unity, degraded to mean simply property, overrode considerations of human dignity and common sense.

It took centuries for English common law to be transformed by the Christian insight that women were spiritually equal to men, that every person has a special dignity and direct relationship to God, a particular vocation, and the rights and responsibilities that go along with it.

Today there is little trace left of the common law assumptions concerning the unity of husband and wife. The pendulum has swung to the other extreme. Marriage is now viewed as the least enforceable contract on earth, dissolvable almost at will.

Yet the courts have transferred the extreme, distorted logic of the old Common Law from the marital bed to the womb. The maternal rather than the marital relationship is now removed from the ordinary scrutiny of law, exempted from any rational consideration of responsibilities and rights, crafted as a radically imbalanced case of one human being owning another as “chattel,” to be disposed of at her own discretion.

This is precisely what the feminist movement wanted to avoid. As the early suffragettes fought the laws that lingered from the days when they were considered property, they argued that their unborn children must not be considered property, either. (For documentation, look up Feminists for Life in Washington, D.C.)

This legal “development" in the Connecticut Supreme Court is in no sense a piece of progress toward the free development of persons or the recognition of human dignity. Instead, it is a lurch backward, into a more primitive and irrational state of legal affairs.

It falls short of the medieval understanding of basic biology and matches the worst of the human-rights abuses of the Middle Ages. We invite the Hartford courthouse to join the rest of us here in the 21st century.