Something Better, Something Smarter

I read a very interesting article in the Stanford Review today. The basic theme was that the pro-life/pro-choice argument does not depend on religion. In many ways the author is correct in asserting "The logical case for life is built entirely upon premises grounded in the Constitution and science." After all, the Constitution grants life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to any person.

So the question becomes when does something become a person?

The debate over the legality of abortion, then, reduces to the question of fetal personhood, and the most reasonable definition of a person is a living human organism. Additional constraints on this definition based on race, age, or level of dependency inevitably reduce to discrimination. As a handbook published by Feminists for Life puts it, “If we take any living member of the species homo sapiens and put them outside the realm of legal protection, we undercut the case against discrimination for everyone else.”

He claims that a fetus is a person and then immediately equates the abortion of a fetus with discrimination. That seems like a pretty big leap to me. Perhaps there needs to be new terms and new ideas instead of labeling abortion as discrimination.

I would argue that a life becomes human when higher brain functions begin. That is, after all, what sets us apart from other animals and gives us personality, critical thinking, and creative reasoning skills. But what would that mean for people that have lost the higher brain function or were born without it? Would that mean that those people were somehow no longer human?

The fear seems to be that if we define human life and beginning at conception, or, as I suggest, when higher brain functions begin (mid 3rd Trimester) then we would be both opening the door to discrimination practices and the striping of humanity from people with injuries or malformed brains. I'm all for defining things, but making things that black and white would mean throwing out all common sense.

First of all, if a fetus is a person and a woman miscarries will there be an investigation into what the possible causes of death were? Often a miscarriage is due to a problem with the child. Would the woman still be interrogated and perhaps punished for being careless around a smoker, or taking too bumpy a car ride?

What about a person that suffers a tragic accident and is now in a vegetative state? Would he cease being a human at any point?

Capps's point was that you do not need religion to argue the pro-life view and I agree, (I would add you don't need it for nearly anything else either). But he goes off the deep end when he seems to suggest that a fetus has Constitutional rights. Maybe we do need to define when a human life begins and when the protections of the Constitution begin, but we will not be able to do it with old ideas or old terms. We need something better, we need something smarter.
But What?