No one here has advocated killing a baby or a foetus against the will of the mother.

True, a newborn isn’t a ‘person’ in the sense that you use the word. Perhaps ‘human being’ might be a better term; ‘individual’ might be worse. But, as a term that indicates a basic social status that includes a bundle of fundamental rights, ‘personhood’ seems to work pretty well, though I have no definite idea at what stage ‘personhood’ should be granted.

#37 GD: Some shocking things can be posted, even on a nice blog like CV – but that’s good. A statement that apalls us may apall us all the more because we know that it’s rational. We just have to dig deeper for an effective reply.

This, was a standout:

“Human life is one of the least valuable obserables on planet Earth – and one of the most miserable. Our goals should be to have less of it of higher quality”

Yeah. A real tragedy eugenics never caught on.

You indicate in your close to #35 your awareness of the significance of addressing the question of personhood; we’re in agreement 100% here. Addressing the question of personhood maintains the concept of personhood – in however nebulous a state. But once personhood is defined the concept can be appropriated by those who may not have humanity’s better interests at heart.

But as you indicate, in the absence of a notion of personhood morality is meaningless.

IMO the question of personhood should ever be posed, but never quite answered.

If we abandon the question of personhood, we are philosophically open to pure uninhibited amorality.

Perhaps there’s no definite cut-off point, but the grey zone can be pushed back at least to 6 months.

Q.

The only thing we can say is that someone is definitely a person once he/she is born.

But that saying is meaningless.
Regardless of the potential fuzzyness, it is useless to talk about personhood without having some meaningful way to descripe the scale. The concept of ‘baldness’ is only useful because we know it is a function of the number of hairs a person has. Until that is defined we are open to claims of God-given- spectral-headfuzz on some who apear bald and lack of that headfuzz on say, animals that appear hairy.

If it’s fuzzy we need a reason why certain organisms score .001 person and others .999. What produces that score? Otherwise saying that a newborn is a person is just as meaningless as saying that a zygote has a soul.

not quite. Take the following example — it is possible to tell when someone is definitely bald, and it is possible to tell when someone is not bald. But now many hairs does it take for someone to be definitely not bald?

Clearly, you and i are people. Anti abortion people say that personhood begins either at fertilisation or at the implantation of the zygote in the uterine lining (there’s some disagreement — people who are anti-emergency-contraception think the former).

Other people think that personhood beings when a foetus starts to look like a person, or starts showing brain activity, or starts being able to breathe, or is first able to survive outside the mother’s body. But it’s i’mpossible to say *exactly* when personhood starts. The only thing we can say is that someone is definitely a person once he/she is born.

Q.

Quibbler:
Then it is equally impossible to prove that I am a person, should my personhood be a private judgement made on the level of other individuals? Here there be Dragons.

I think the concept only appears fuzzy because it is unknown.

An economically-based value system is difficult to argue against because it’s quantifiable and therefore readily explicable. “The bottom line” becomes an independent alternative to “Because the Bible says so” for many of those lacking the courage or mental resources to deal with ambiguity.

What many politicians do is inconsistently related to any given value system. Politics is a magnet for sociopaths; we shouldn’t be surprised at many politicians’ ability to effortlessly leap back and forth between value systems, given that, to the sociopath, morality is merely something to be exploited.

To be fair, some politicians are decent human beings who are tormented by having to frequently compromise their beliefs to accommodate practical concerns.

“Tirhas Habtegiris, a 27-year-old legal immigrant being kept alive by a ventilator as she lay dying of cancer last month in the Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano, Tex. Physicians offered no prospect for her recovery. She was hoping, however, to hang on until her East African mother could reach her bedside.

Ms. Habtegiris had little money and no health insurance. On Dec. 1, hospital authorities notified her brother that unless another hospital could be found to treat his sister, Baylor would be forced to discontinue care after 10 days…. Baylor disconnected her ventilator on Dec. 12, invoking a law signed in 1999 by George W. Bush, then governor of Texas…. Unlike the comatose Terri Schiavo, Ms. Habtegiris was fully conscious and responsive when she was disconnected, according to her brother. She wanted to continue breathing. Her brother and several other family members have described the agonizing spectacle of her death by suffocation over the next 16 minutes. ”

This law would seem to allow people to withold the necessities of life from those in their care if it represents an economic burden to them. So could a parent claim that they were unable to afford to feed their child and thereby let the child starve to death? Would anyone really prefer infanticide to abortion? Surely anyone who could write a law allowing the willful killing of a conscious human due to economic arguments would embrace the right of a woman to choose an abortion based on economic arguments (even if they rejected other reasons). The “sancitity of human life” seems utterly absent from this Texas law. In fact, the most primitive elements of humanity seem utterly absent from this law.

I’d enthusiastically get behind legislation to support funding for the relocation of refugees from persecutorial regions.

Yeah, not very realistic, I know…

Let’s assume that a baby is a person and a blastula is not. Few of us would argue that it’s moral to kill babies. But, given that there’s no difference in the degree of sophistication between the newborn organism and the organism about to be born, asssigning personhood at birth is obviously arbitrary. My next point is obvious – at what point in the regression from birth does abortion become murder? We can’t know. Ergo, there is a real, albeit indeterminable, possibility that many abortions are murders.

My point in #5 is that the usual liberal coupling (pro-abortion, anti-death penalty) is no less inconsistent than the standard conservative position (anti-abortion, pro-death penalty) given that in both cases the sanctity of human life is cited, and that in both cases we accept the possibility that innocent human beings are being put to death due to the exercise of policy.

I grew up in a “JesusLand” state, in a liberal family inside a conservative enclave inside a liberal enclave inside a conservative state, and I think that’s why I’m never going to welcome the US splitting into alien red state/blue state societies. I do think it’s sensible to have variations in state law according to local culture; but we have limits on the tyranny of the majority, and the whole rejectionist attitude I see sometimes in coastal liberal areas, “let the yahoos have their patriarchal theocracy in their own stupid states”, just doesn’t wash because a lot of people in those states weren’t consulted and can’t afford to get out. Also, the rest of us eventually end up paying for the social fallout.

We won’t have to wait for Roe to be overturned for the crazy quilt of abortion restrictions to come into being; through a combination of legislative chipping at the edges, the public vilification of doctors, and capitulation to terrorists, it’s already here—try actually getting an abortion in the Dakotas. There’s not a lot I can do about it, but I’m never going to like it.

The funniest summary of the republican position on the value of life I have seen. And yes I realize that it is not completly fair.

Furthermore the argument shouldnt *be* about personhood. It’s about whether that judgement can be a private judgement made on the level of the individual.

Q.

The burden of proof is ALWAYS on the person who cares the most.

They are saving lives, you are protecting choice, how important is it to you? If it really matters, you should demonstrate the [non]personhood of the fetus.

“they are the one trying to take another person’s rights away.”

This presupposes that the mother is ‘a person’, which is just as unproven or arbitrary as the fetus being a person.
It could also be argued that the burden is on the mothers/doctors, as they are the ones trying to kill ‘something’.

I’m not sure if either personhood or nonpersonhood constitute an extraordinary claim. (or both)