Time Immortal

He addresses the issue of the “personhood” of the unborn in response to a question asking about what distinctions exist, if any, between what is a “person” and what is a “human.”

It is not a legal question. Until just recently, the law held abortion to be illegal, and the overturning of those laws were not based on legal precedent.

It is not a biological question. What defines a homo sapiens to a biologist is genetic material, i.e. descent. There is no question that even a single-celled organism is living, and that, if it comes from a bisexual race, it has a mother and a father. The word ‘embryo’ refers to the stage of development of an organism of a species: for example, an unborn fox kit passed through an embryo stage of development. No biologist would argue that an unborn fox was not a member of the species “fox”.

It is absurd to classify an unborn homo sapiens and “not a member of any species” on the grounds of a lack of observable phenotype characteristics. No biologist classifies a bald man as ‘not a mammal’ on the grounds that he does not suckle his young, being a male, and is not hairy, being bald.

It is not a moral question. No one makes caring for a diseased or underdeveloped loved one dependent on that loved one’s ability to pass an IQ test or show some form specifically human behavior. If your husband has a stroke, and loses the human capacity for reasoning in his cortex, he becomes your dependent; he does not become your property or your livestock. When he dies, you still call a mortician, not a butcher.

So what it the question of personhood?

Personhood is an excuse. If one wishes to work one’s will upon the weak and helpless, one first removes their humanity in thought. Call the Jews sons of Pigs. Call the Negroes sub-human. Call the worthless old folk bread gobblers or vegetables. Called the unborn any name by what they are: human offspring. Babies.

He’s hardly the first to observe this, and he certainly won’t be the last. Ultimately, though, many of the arguments in favour of abortion reduce to this basic issue: denying the protection and rights afforded by a legal categorization to a segment of humanity — in this case, the unborn.

Oh, there are obvious practical and semantic differences between the current abortion regimes and, say, the plight of blacks in the U.S. prior to, and even after, the American Civil War. But the underlying logic is more or less the same: those things are not “people” and so can be mistreated/disposed of on a whim.

That’s what this debate is really about: at what point is it/should it be legal to kill a human being in any capacity other than an act of self-defence*?