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The Emperor's Clothes or a Cheap Tuxedo
The Myth of Hitler's Pope, Part I
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Embryonic Stem Cell Research Again
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"Don't Impose Your Religion on Me"
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Who Killed Jesus?
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You've Come a Long Way, Baby
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Two Points of View on the Birth of Jesus
You Gotta Kill Them.  How Else Are They Going To Learn?
Perplexing Christmas Questions
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What is Conscience Anyhow?
Divorce of Love and Life
What Counts as a Mass?
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Generation-X'ers Smart in Every Way But One
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The Unknown God
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Many are Wed but Few are Married
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Religious Persecution in the U.S.?
What Makes a Person a Person?
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Why Attend Mass Every Sunday?
Is it All Right to Pull the Plug?
An Appeal for Intolerance
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A Voting Catechism
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Vouchers: Has Their Time Come?
What Child is This?
What did they die of?
You are the Man
You may be a liberal if...
Get Rid of that Worthless Relative
Planned Un-Parenthood
Weighing Pro-Life Issues Prior to Voting

by Monsignor James C. Brunner

Faith Points

In the abortion debate pro-lifers say that the fetus is a person from conception and therefore it is wrong to kill it. Pro-abortionists say the fetus is not a person until it has developed somewhat and so it is all right to kill it. Who is right and how can the question be decided? It will do no good to appeal to religious belief because not everyone is religious.

Abortionists have a bewildering number of points where they say personhood begins. Here are some of the things they list: implantation, acquisition of structure and familiar human form, presence of a heartbeat, viability, independence, consciousness, experience, sentience and sensitivity to pain, thought, socialization, desire for continued existence, birth, rationality, that is, ability to choose ends and means and not just animal-like responses to stimuli, and acceptance by the mother.

There are three things wrong with this list. First, they are question-begging, which means that they merely assert and do not prove that one of these developmental points is required for personhood. Second, they confuse function with nature, a mistake similar to confusing the dog’s bark with the dog. One does not develop to acquire a human nature. It is the human nature that develops. Third, these requirements lead to absurdities and inconsistencies.

Implantation is not the sign of a person, but the sign of his or her presence. A fetus has exactly the structure and human form appropriate for its state of development. A microscope informs us of the presence of the characteristically human forty-six chromosomes. Personhood should be the result of possessing a certain nature rather than our familiarity with stages of fetal development. An adult who is undoubtedly a person remains such when he is on a heart-lung machine when his heart has stopped beating on its own. It is interesting that the embryonic heart begins irregular pulses at twenty-four days that become smooth at thirty-one days, long before most abortions take place. Viability cannot be what determines personhood because that is mainly a matter of medical technology. With an artificial uterus it might be possible to save babies expelled from the womb from the very beginning. Degree of dependence cannot determine personhood because an infant, recognized by most as a person, is still dependent and adults are subject to conditions that make them totally dependent on others. Consciousness cannot be a requirement for personhood since adults can lose consciousness without ceasing to be persons. Presumably in line with the logic of abortionists it would be permissible to kill them. A fetus is not unconscious like a stone that will never become conscious.

It is not correct to say that the fetus has no experience. It is active from the beginning taking charge of the pregnancy. If conscious, rational experience were required for personhood an infant would not be a person. Aphasia in adults does not wipe out their personhood. If personhood consisted in the current possession of sentience, sensitivity to pain, thought, and socialization adults in states of unconsciousness would not be persons. Actually, the fetus possesses nociceptors (sensory receptors) before the ninth week of gestation and can experience pain. Levels of development are relevant to the functioning a person and not to his nature. Even animals have a desire for continued existence. According to the argument one is not a person if he either does not have an interest in his continued existence or did not have it in the past. On this principle it would not be permissible to kill a teenager who lost consciousness, but licit to kill one that never acquired it. If a principle leads to absurd conclusions it must itself be absurd. With respect to possession of consciousness there is no essential difference between "did, but does not" and "does not, but will." How much choosing of ends and means is done by newborns? Why should fetuses be held to a higher standard than infants to be counted as persons? If fetal responses can be compared to animal responses to stimuli, must the same be said of unconscious adults? Acceptance by the mother is easily the most absurd of the abortionists’ standard for personhood. If a woman were carrying twins unbeknownst to her, one whom she accepted would be a person while the other, biologically similar in every respect, would be something other than human.

It is clear that all the abortionists’ requirements for personhood are arbitrary and capricious and mere question-begging. If possession of the items on their list are eliminated as requirements, what is left to count as a person? The one thing that remains in a person who is comatose, senile, anesthetized, or sleeping is the possession of a nature that has the basic capacity for sensing, knowing, willing, desiring, and relating others in self-reflective ways. This is a valid and adequate criterion of personhood and indeed the only reason we think of non-functioning people as persons. A human zygote has the capacity to act in these ways. Therefore a human zygote is a person, not a potential person, but a person with as yet unrealized potential. A person is not an individual with an actual or developed capacity for reasoning but one who has a positive potential for it. A human zygote has a positive potential for rationality whereas a rabbit zygote lacks it altogether. A human embryo would never develop rationality unless it was the sort of being that had this capacity. A good definition of a human person is an organism that possesses a rational nature. Because of the continuum between the developed person and the human zygote, one becomes a human person at conception in the unique combination of maternal and paternal chromosomes. A human individual must be a human person. The rights that we attribute to persons presuppose the power of reasoning but only insofar as this power is inherent in human nature. If recognition of personhood and its accompanying rights is not based on nature, but on arbitrary decision, everyone is in danger. Arbitrary decisions in the past have gone against African-Americans, Jews, and others thought not to have meaningful lives. We either respect humans as persons because of their rational nature or we make arbitrary decisions about who is a person and a holder of human rights. If human life in the womb is not sacred because it has a human nature it is not sacred at any stage of development.