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The issue of abortion hinges on the question of personhood. Virtually everyone believes that persons possess a unique status: Taking the life span of another person, barring extreme conditions, is a sin. Pro-lifers argue that the exact same is true of abortion, because fetuses are persons-hence the term "Pro-life." Most pro-choicers, on the other hand, would argue that fetuses are not persons until they achieve a late stage of development, either at the moment of birth or some time prior to it.

At a column timed to coincide with Roe v. Wade's fortieth anniversary, Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams contended that "a fetus may be a human lifetime without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides." In 1971, the ethical philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson made a similar claim from "A Defense of Abortion." She argued that abortion may nevertheless be morally tolerable if "The embryo has already become an individual person well before arrival," because "The right to life consists not from the right not to be killed, but rather at the right not to be killed unjustly." If a girl terminates the life span of her own fetus in a means that could be considered just, then no one's right to life has been violated.

The majority of Thomson's article is taken up with delineating a few of the circumstances where one person may justifiably take the life span of another. For example: a bunch of music lovers has attached your circulatory system to that of an unconscious violinist in order to save his life. The music lovers say you must remain attached to the violinist, and therefore virtually incapacitated, for nine months. Thomson answers that remaining joined to the musician could be a "Good kindness," but maybe not a moral obligation. There are two possible problems with Thomson's debate. A ethical code might ask you to save the violinist's lifetime, also Thomson doesn't adequately explain why that code is more unreasonable instead of demanding.

Second, by accepting that a fetus may be a whole human person, either Thomson and Williams may concede too much to the pro-life position. In explaining why she believes "The fetus has already become a person well before arrival," Thomson points out "The early in its lifetime it begins to get human traits." For example, from the tenth week, the "Brain activity has been detectable," and the embryo has a face and inner organs. Along the same lines, Williams asks, rhetorically, "Are you less of a person lifetime when you look like a tadpole than when you are able to suck on your mind?" .

Both Thomson and Williams seem to take it as a given that there is a firm, bright line separating persons from non-persons. Another abode, pragmatist Richard Rorty, could call this the essentialist position: the belief that persons have some transcendental property that sets them apart from the other animals. In Philosophy and Social Hope, he wrote, "Darwin made it hard for essentialists to think about the greater anthropoids as having abruptly acquired an additional added ingredient referred to as'reason\.ntelligence,' rather than simply more of the sort of adorable that the lower anthropoids had already triumphed." Just as it is difficult to determine at what point a fetus is imbued with personhood, Darwin jeopardized the predominant belief that there was a clear demarcation between humans and the other species.

In other words, taking Darwin seriously may mean "Accepting that we differ from other animals simply in the intricacy of their behavior." Within this view, people just happen to be at one particular end of a spectrum. That does not indicate that people do not have status that is moral; only that ethical status comes from being raised up on the spectrum. Fetuses, as they don't display the behavioral complexity of autonomous people, might be put lower on the spectrum. Another method of looking at personhood comes from the area of experimental philosophy, a discipline which combines psychological testing with traditional doctrine.

Joshua Knobe, a pioneer in the area,. Says his research indicates that folks use two criteria to determine what a person is: behavioral complexity and the ability to experience strong emotions. According to a Salon interview with Knobe, "When asked to envision. Robot precisely like a person,' will argue that it isn't a person because it cannot possibly have genuine phenomenological experiences like pleasure and pain. Animals, on the other hand,.ossess phenomenological traits, but not intricate reasoning,' therefore they cannot be persons either." If we accepted that definition, those who argue that fetuses are persons could have the responsibility of demonstrating that they have a capacity for both. Failing that, they're left with the challenge of constructing another, more plausible account of what makes a person.

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