[QUOTE=Maureen]
Quite a few people with a lot more letters after their names than me that specialize in this field of research. Do you have a better, scientifically supported explanation of what constitutes personhood? One that is not biased by religion of any stripe?
[/QUOTE]
I disagree. Personhood isn’t a scientific question, it is a moral or legal question.
There is no scientific definition of personhood, because real life doesn’t have any neon flashing signs of personhood. One day we have sperm and eggs, the next day a fertillized egg, a few days later a multicellular embryo, later a fetus, later a viable unborn baby, later a born baby, later a toddler, later a child, later a teenager, later an adult, later a corpse. Usually there’s a pretty clear divide between an alive person and a dead person, except sometimes it isn’t so clear cut. When someone’s brain is dead, we call them dead, even if their heart is still beating. But how dead is dead? People can be mostly dead, legally dead, dead for all intents and purposes, but there’s no such thing as a magic moment of death, there’s no such thing as a magic moment of personhood.
Biology doesn’t work that way. There are all kinds of phenomena that argue against a hard and fast definition of personhood, or life, or death. Identical twins. Conjoined twins. Some people are chimeras, where two genetically distinct embryos fused to form one individual. Babies without brains, babies without frontal lobes, babies with severely atrophied frontal lobes, babies with very small frontal lobes, babies with impaired brain function, babies that have no chance to live, babies that have almost no chance to live.
And all this doesn’t mean that we have to criminalize abortion because we can’t draw any bright lines. We know that most conceptions–greater than 50%–never make it to term. What does that say about the moral status of a fertillized egg or early embryo? It says that herculean efforts to save any particular random early embryo are doomed, because for every one you save there will be hundreds more that you can’t. So I’m not going to get upset if someone prevents the development of an early embryo, or prevents a fertillized egg from implanting, or undergoes a lifesaving procedure that has the side effect of ending any pregnancy they might or might not have.
But that doesn’t mean a baby is a tumor, or a thing. One day we have a cell, later we have a baby. How we treat this entity in between is a matter of ethics or law or morals, but it isn’t a scientific question, although scientific information can inform our moral decisions.