Children's Web magazine...
Entertaining , Educational, Fun,Informative and MORE

Although, there are many non-religious arguments regarding abortion which can provide good moral guidance. One argument is the idea of ‘personhood’. Personhood distinguishes between ‘life’, ‘human’ and ‘person. Life is seen as a very broad term for example, a zygote is seen as a form of life but not a human as humans are simply seen as living organisms that are homo-sapiens. However, being a human being does not necessarily make you a person. Personhood defines a person as someone who has rationality, sentience, emotions, free-will and continuity. It is unanimously agreed that foetus’ do not possess all of these characteristics. As a result, Personhood rejects the Sanctity of Life as it does not believe that all life forms are precious and it strongly emphasises that some life forms are more valuable than others. In Johnathan Glover’s book “Causing Death and Saving Lives”, he argues that rejecting the concept of the Sanctity of Life does not mean that we reject the idea that life can be sacred. Instead, he suggests that only some life forms are precious. Glover continues on to state that life is only valuable “as a necessary vehicle of consciousness”. For this reason, a foetus is not deemed as a sacred life form as whilst it’s in the womb, it is not conscious.

On the other hand, there are issues with the concept of Personhood. It has not been officially established when Personhood actually begins. Often, religion decides that the foetus becomes sacred during the development process as Catholics believe this is at the point of contraception whereas Muslims believe this is at the point of ensoulment. However, the law decides that the foetus becomes sacred at the point of viability which is at 24 weeks. When the foetus is viable, this means that should the foetus be born, it would survive with assistance. Others argue that the foetus becomes valuable at the point of birth as this is where it is actually out of the womb. Singer, using Preference Utilitarianism counteracts this dividing line as he says “it seems peculiar to hold that we may not kill the premature infant, but may kill the more developed foetus”. Although Mary Anne Warren argues that a human becomes a person when it is able to respect another person’s right to live, this is known as “moral reciprocity”. Therefore, seeing as a foetus does not have any moral reciprocity until it is an infant, it is not a person until then. Overall, the issues with personhood is that there isn’t an obvious stage where it is clear that the human becomes a person. This is due to all the potential counteracts that could be given at each stage. In addition, as there are so many differing opinions about this, it is clear that there isn’t an obvious stage as people do not seem to agree on which stage it is.