>Burroughs gave us talking assholes, and now we have appendices with the
>potential to breathe, cry, pee, etc.
As Sam has already suggested, these criteria for personhood would have included at some point in its life the 1/4 lb patty in the cheeseburger drenched in ranch sauce that you got all over the place again. That one can be a person to others and to oneself outside of social relations is simply an absurdity. I think the argument is about when an infant becomes a person.
Now Max perhaps you think the embryo was always a person...even back to when it was only an egg or sperm.
Let me draw from John Moore's Science as A Way of Knowing for some interesting background. The longest debate in embryology was that between preformation (all parts of the adult body are already present in the ovum) vs epigenesis (different parts appear in sequence).
Of course historic preformationism suffered the problem if both the sperm and ova contain preformed bodies, why twins do not result from each conception. Historically the difficulty had been circumvented by positing that either the sperm or the ovum contained the tiny body. There were the ovists, who believed the homunculus (tiny body, little man) to be in the eggs and the spermists (or animalculists), who believed the homonculus to be in the sperm. And this gave rise inescapably to real logical howlers. Consider that the homonculus itself must contain ovaries and those ovaries must have eggs with homunculi, and those homunculi again must have the next generation of homunculi and so on--like a set of Russian dolls. Of course this means that the entire future of the human race was included in the successively encapsulated homunculi in the ovaries of Eve, the more than metaphorical Mother of Humanity. Some of our Christian brethren may maintain such beliefs even today.
Now of course it is truly difficult to be an actual performationist today--you have to ban the teaching of any modern biology. However one could argue that genetic reductionism is a kind of preformationism--preformed information that serves as *the* actual *blueprint* for the development of adult human being, instead of DNA being only a recipe (as both anti reductionist Barbara Katz Rothman and reductionist John Maynard Smith put it).
And to the extent that the asocial life form in utero is thought to be already complete as a person at conception--if not in actual structure, as some of our Christian brethren may still think, then at least in the form of a viable and final blueprint, e.g., a 'criminal' whom leading social scientists would consider it cost efficient to thus abort-it seems to me pro life arguments have an easier time of making the charge that abortion is a killing of persons. There seems to be strange affinity between the Christian performationists and modern genetic reductionists (or information preformationists) in their sense of the completeness of the person at conception.
Has anybody considered the abortion controversy in terms of peoples' understanding of embryology?
yours, rnb