Your are grossly over-generalizing and over-globalizing a single, common phrase.
A common phrase? If you say so.
I am no animal of any sort.
And quite the contrary, she has a strongly spiritual perspective on human beings.
Nothing in this article indicates that.
Perhaps she should incorporate that belief into her future articles to preclude any assumptions made by readers.
OK, your comments are fair, inasmuch as you are not familiar with Mathewes-Green’s other writings, and she does not have a spiritual focus in the NR article at hand. I suspect NR requested a secular perspective and that’s what she produced.
She is the wife of an Eastern Orthodox priest and has been writing Christian books and articles from that perspective for years, as well as giving talks at retreats and conferences sponsored by her (Antiochian Orthodox) church and others.
I do think her use of the phrase “the human animal” is justified in this context. She’s saying that if some animal mothers were massively destroying their young, we’d be worried that something was catastrophically wrong with their situation. Mathewes-Green wonders why we don’t react to the human abortion situation as if something were catastrophically wrong.
I’d say that if prized pedigreed dogs or valuable racehorses, or even dolphins or leopards, were destroying their young, there would be anxious researchers investigating what the hell was going on, and highly-publicized emergency measures taken to prevent any more losses of valuable animal life.
And Frederica is right: why don’t we treat humans with even that much consideration?