From: yamauchi@ces.cwru.edu (Brian Yamauchi)
Newsgroups: talk.abortion
Subject: Pro-Choice Criteria for Personhood
Date: 11 Oct 92 15:42:51
Organization: Case Western Reserve University
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: sartre.caisr.cwru.edu

I'm curious about the criteria that other people who are pro-choice
would use to determine whether an organism is a person.  I'm
pro-choice, but it seems to me that abortion rights activists are
often unclear about this in their public statements.

I'm not interested in debating with pro-lifers who believe that
personhood begins at conception.  They generally believe this for one
or both of the following reasons:

1) They believe that a soul enters the body at conception.
2) They believe that personhood is defined by having a unique genetic
code.

It seems pointless to argue over these.  (1) is a religious statement
which one can either believe or not (I don't).  (2) is a semantic
definition which one can either choose to adopt or not (I choose not
to).

On the other hand, there are a number of criteria that are consistent
with various types of pro-choice positions.

The most common, viability, seems to me to be the weakest, since it is
a function of the external technological level of the fetus'
surrounding society.  Using this criteria, an American n-month old
fetus might be a person when an African fetus of the same age would
not be.

To me, the most compelling criteria would be one based on
self-awareness.  Unfortunately, this is rather difficult to measure
directly.  As far as I'm concerned, the _minimal_ criteria would
include both brain activity and responsiveness to external stimuli.  I
realize that this would include some deep coma victims among the dead,
but it's perhaps not unreasonable to consider deep comas a form of
(sometimes) reversible brain death.

At the other end, I would consider the ability to build a complex
model of oneself and one's environment to be sufficient, though
perhaps not necessary, conditions for self-awareness.  However, testing
this is difficult until the subject in question develops the ability
to use language effectively.

The use of birth as a defining point for personhood may convenient,
but I rarely hear pro-choicers give a coherent explanation for why the
fetus itself is different one minute after both than one minute
before.  Certainly it's relationship with it's mother has changed, but
that shouldn't affect whether or not is it a person.

On the other hand, I can think of at least one: as soon as an infant
is born, it receives a flood of sensory input that is much richer than
what it previously experienced in the womb.  It's possible that this
stimuli (especially the ability to visually differentiate itself from
its environment) may lead to a sharp discontinuity in its level of
self-awareness.

Still, uncomfortable as it may be to everyone, there's no reason in
principle why one couldn't extend the defining point to a time after
birth -- perhaps the first time the infant speaks, or forms meaningful
sentences, or demonstrates elementary spatial reasoning (e.g. some of
the early Piaget tests).  I remember reading a paper that argued that
the "infantile amnesia" experienced by all people results from the
lack of an ability to encode memories into long-term storage, and
perhaps one could also argue that self-awareness is limited before
this capability develops.  It's easy to dismiss "infanticide" charges
as the ravings of fanatic pro-lifers, but I think it's worthwhile to
consider the implications of whatever criteria one uses to determine
personhood...
--
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Brian Yamauchi			Case Western Reserve University
yamauchi@alpha.ces.cwru.edu	Department of Computer Engineering and Science
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