Fetal Personhood

Parents commenting at graduation of daughter.

Be thankful we didn't have to send her four phantom brothers or sisters to college!

Recent studies suggest that many fertilized embryos don't implant or survive long enough to become detectable hormonally; adding these to the total yields a miscarriage rate of perhaps 80 percent. That is, for each person born alive there may have been four phantom brothers or sisters who died before they could be born.

--Jared Diamond, "The Cruel Logic of Our Genes," Discover, Nov 1989, p. 74

Opposition to abortion appears to be based on the mistaken belief that an immaterial soul is equivalent to personhood, and that at conception a Creator gives each embryo a unique soul that must not be destroyed.

Each ovum and each spermatozoon has the potential to become a person if allowed to combine with its counterpart and continue development to birth. Therefore, abstinence prevents far more potential persons from becoming loved actual persons than does elective abortion. Because the number of possible potential persons is unmanageably huge, the best option is to aid already born children and leave all choices regarding reproduction solely in the control of each woman in consultation wtih her doctor.

Abortion is not a crime in biblical scripture. If fighting men hurt a pregnant woman, causing her to miscarry, then, if any harm follows the miscarriage - that is, any harm to the woman, not the fetus, which is already dead - her husband may fine the man who hurt her. [Exo 21:22-25]

Every cell in our body -- hair, fingernails, saliva, liver, etc. -- is alive and human, yet not a person.

Most women who have abortions have no regrets and would make the same choice again in similar circumstances, but children born to women denied abortion have more genetic malformations, more insecure childhoods, and more divorce-prone parents. They perform worse at school, have more psychosomatic symptoms, and more often need welfare support and/or psychiatric treatment.

-- Paul K. B. Dagg, The Psychological Sequelae of Therapeutic Abortion - Denied and Completed, American Journal of Psychiatry, 1991, Vol.148, No.5, p.578-585

The illustration (below) shows that the human cerebral cortex at birth has a virtual absence of synaptic connections. [From: D. F. Roberts and A. M. Thomson, The Biology of Human Fetal Growth, 1976, p.145]. Because abundant connections are essential to memory and thought, the fetus is not yet a person.