>Even though Singer is pro-choice, he never considers abortion as a right
>>necessary for women to gain personhood on a par with men.
This seems close to the sort of logic RTLs use, doesn't it? That abortion deprives the unborn of the chance to gain their (already immanent) personhood on a par with the born? At least Singer's 28 days say there's no such immanence in the unborn. Whatever personhood is, for Singer there's none of it to be found in a new-born babe. So, no moral problem with abortion! This happily dovetails with the amoralist view I've been ascribing to you and Carrol, and fits that of Marxian thinkers like Jim Heartfield, who believe that the unsocialised being is not a human being (I'd agree with Jim's specific conclusion if I thought the claim that communication - indistinguishable from forms of human communication - can and does occur between foetus and external world were not tenable). I just don't go with that tabula rasa stuff, in other words - seems to me there must be a *biological* moment when a foetus/baby becomes able to accord meaning (the currency of human communication), and I don't see why that moment should necessarily be post-birth, never mind a month down the track.
So, *if we're gonna talk immanent humanity as decisive criterion*, I'd be inclined to go back in time rather than 28 days forward. This'd be a hard road to walk as the question we're then asking is, 'when is abortion just killing, and when is it murder?'. Reckon this is one reason why JKS reckons abortion is difficult. It's certainly why I think it is. I'd have no idea how we could fix such a moment, but would surmise that a biological moment would require a certain empirically manifest internal process and/or structure of sorts (which we probably haven't found and about which I know nothing, at any rate).
In that 'light', it all comes down to who is to decide, I reckon. The foetus can't (can't morally reason - and can't avow an interest either), and the woman can (can morally reason, is not the moral inferior of any other entity or being, and does have an avowed interest - which clearly overrides the sum of all other avowable interests). For society to wrest this moral authority (a positive freedom) from the woman is tenable only on the premises that murder is *definitely* being done and that all society has an equal interest and concomitant sovereign right in the prevention of murder. I'm okay with (b), but (a) has to be an awful lot clearer (clearer than I reckon it'll ever be), lest we privilege a possibility over the real taking of real moral authority (part of what I reckon 'personhood' is) and real life (that which the unwilling mother might have had or avoided but for the imposition of mothering the child) from a demonstrably real person.
On which grounds I reason that, ceteris paribus, I have no tenable business holding forth on abortion, as I have had none in any of the dozen posts I have generated on the matter over the last few years.
Er, so I'll shut up.
Rob.