As science evolves, it has been getting tougher for the pro-choice movement to deny that there is indeed a living baby inside the mother, beginning at the moment of conception. It’s caused some of them to concede this point to the pro-life side, but then move to a more ambiguous stance called “personhood.”
This article will define what personhood is and why it matters, explain the conservative argument against the pro-choice claim, and dismantle popular pro-choice talking points by using facts and logic.
In This Argument…
- What personhood is, and why the ‘personhood’ argument is a desperate attempt from the pro-choice side
- Why the Declaration of Independence is the best way to legally define personhood, and how God ultimately matters
- Dismantling popular pro-choice talking points because they do not make sense morally and logically
- Several examples of atrocities that have been committed in history because some subset of the human race has not been considered to be persons
Table of Contents
What Is Personhood and Why Does It Matter?
Personhood is defined as “the state or fact of being a person,” according to Dictionary.com. A person, is a “a human being, whether an adult or child:” Now this might seem like the matter is settled, right? Personhood belongs to whomever is a human being. But the real battle is over legal and moral recognition, not just language.
So, the left demands that a person is someone with certain traits, and that personhood only belongs to those who have those certain traits. It is the left’s desperate attempt to keep the pro-choice movement alive. Without personhood being in question, abortion could not be legally justified, because the unborn would be entitled to the same right to life as any other person.
Why Does Personhood Matter?
The debate about personhood became relevant at the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which struck down state laws banning abortion and recognized a constitutional right to privacy in pregnancy decisions. This is because the 14th Amendment says, “…nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The problem is, while the 14th Amendment defines citizenship as belonging to those “born or naturalized,” it does not give a definition of person.
Nowhere in the 14th Amendment or the Constitution is a person defined, and during the Roe v. Wade decision, the Court explicitly rejected the idea that the word “person” in the 14th Amendment applies to the unborn. As the Court put it, “the word person, as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.” While it defines citizenship as belonging to those “born or naturalized,” it does not give a comprehensive definition of “person.”
The question is now, “When does a human being becomes a person?” This is why many pro-choice activists concede the scientific fact that there is a human being at conception, but because he or she does not have personhood, he or she is not protected by the 14th Amendment.
So here’s the debate from the pro-choice side: Personhood is a legal construct tied to birth, viability, or certain traits, not being human. If the baby inside of the womb does not have personhood, they are not protected under law and do not have a right to life.
Now the problem is that no agreed-upon definition of personhood on the pro-choice side. There are different theories and ideas of what that human being could be or have, but conveniently they almost always exclude the unborn.
When Does Personhood Begin? A Pro-Life View: Conception
While not legally binding, the Declaration of Independence expresses America’s founding moral vision that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights. If we take that seriously, personhood begins at creation, not at birth. Our laws should reflect that truth.
The conservative pro-life opinion on when personhood begins is that it begins at conception. Since we know that a distinct human being is created at conception, then we can apply legal and moral standards to them as well.
Read More – Does Life Begin at Conception?
A human being has inherent dignity, an inherent right to life because they are human, which comes from one of the most consequential founding documents of the United States, the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration of Independence states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
It clearly states that all men are CREATED equal, that they are endowed by their CREATOR. This means, according to the Declaration of Independence, that being a person starts at the moment of their creation, conception.
The text doesn’t say that all men are born equal, it says created equal. Therefore, if you are created, you are already a person in the moral sense, with rights that precede the government. The Declaration of Independence makes it clear that the rights come from something above the government, God, and not the government. So the government doesn’t give or take away the right to life, it is inherently given to all created human beings by God.
This means that personhood is not something we assign, it is something we recognize. Any other argument is not only Un-American because it violates our founding principles, it is unjust because it violates natural law.
Now there are several excuses that pro-choice activists try it use to get around this, and while they are irrelevant if we recognize the Declaration of Independence, let’s go over popular talking points that aim to define personhood to exclude most or all of the unborn.
Conservative Answers to Common Pro-Choice Talking Points
Before we dive into the common talking points, it’s essential to recognize that pro-choice advocates rarely have a solid, objective reason for their talking point. Like, why do certain traits, like consciousness, sentience, or autonomy, determine whether a human life has dignity and the right to life?
Why not a heartbeat? Why not the ability to grow? They don’t have a universal principle, it’s often subjective, based on utility, independence, or emotional intuition. If dignity is based on traits, you can just keep shifting the line and this line of thinking has brought about atrocities.
You don’t become a person by earning it through traits. You are a person because you are a member of the human family. That’s the only consistent, objective standard that protects everyone.
But even if we let the pro-choice personhood ideology take this huge psychological leap that allows them to define when personhood begins by certain traits for some reason, we can still dismantle their arguments. Here’s some of the popular ones:
You Get Personhood When You Don’t Have to Depend on Someone Else: One of the most common ways pro-choicers define personhood is through dependency, if the human depends on someone else, in this case the mother. But if personhood is defined by dependency, then newborns, who are totally dependent on their mother to stay alive, are not persons either. Can we kill them?
You Get Personhood When You Are Separate From the Host (The Mother): This argument is like the dependency argument, but it is slightly trickier. But why should location determine personhood? How does the birth canal magically transform a non-person into a person? That’s arbitrary. Furthermore, you don’t become a non-person if your mother donates her kidney to you. Conjoined twins share a continuous, life-sustaining physical connection, yet each twin is universally recognized as a distinct person whose life cannot be taken simply because of that attachment. Likewise, an unborn child’s temporary umbilical link to its mother cannot erase its separate human personhood or right to life.
You Get Personhood When You Have Consciousness (Self-Awareness, Sentience): Many people temporarily lose consciousness, like when fainting, seizures, comas, and even sleeping. Does this mean that we can legally kill someone because they’re in a state like this? Now some pro-choice people say. “no, because they had conscious experience beforehand.” This is still flawed. If past consciousness is what grounds present personhood, then a 22-week pre-term infant who has never yet been awake (its cortex still silent), would have no right to life, even though it has already been born! A 1 day old baby has less consciousness than a 10 year old, doesn’t mean you can kill them. Regardless of that, consciousness alone is not a marker of dignity.
You Get Personhood When You Have Memory: If having a memory determines personhood, then it excludes those like newborns, young infants, crash victims with retrograde amnesia, patients with “locked-in” syndrome, those with Alzheimer’s, and those with dementia.
You Get Personhood When You Have Experience: This argument may sound like it has potential at first, but quickly falls apart when you include newborns and premature babies in the neonatal ICU. Episodic awareness isn’t neurologically possible for the first months of life for a newborn, and many premature babies have never yet been awake or aware outside the womb. If the claim is instead, “the ability to have experience,” then those under general anesthesia can legally be killed.
Born People Are Higher Functioning, So They Get Personhood: This could exclude basically everyone. If a higher way of functioning determines personhood, then who decides what the line is? A parent could say that they are higher functioning than their 3 year old baby, and an 18 year old could say that they are higher functioning in a way than a 90 year old. This could also exclude everyone who has a mental disorder.
You Get Personhood When Your Thalamus Connects to Your Cortex: This is one of the most scientifically sound arguments, and while it sounds convincing, it doesn’t make sense logically or morally. Thalamocortical connection allows for consciousness or the capacity for pain perception, so this argument is wrapped in science to sound objective. But what about coma patients? What about severe brain injury survivors who lack awareness? What about those who cannot feel pain? Now a pro-choice activist might then say, “The fetus may be biologically human, but until the thalamus connects to the cortex, there’s no driver in the car, no conscious presence, so no personhood.” If the ‘driver’ only counts the moment the thalamus plugs into the cortex, that makes no sense, because the same baby is in the ‘car’ seconds before and after the wires connect, so its rights can’t magically switch on at that instant.
You Get Personhood When You Are Born: First of all, the birth canal does not magically give someone the right to life. Nothing changes about the baby five seconds before being born and five seconds after being born. Location doesn’t matter. Second, what makes a 38-week old child that is delivered by C-section different than a 38-week old child who is still in the womb?
You Get Personhood When You Are Viable (Able to Survive Out of the Womb): This is an interesting argument because at first it can sound convincing. A person can only be a person if he or she can survive outside the womb, right? But here’s where it falls apart: A baby can be viable at a younger stage in the womb where they have better technology, and where they have worse technology the baby is likely viable at an older stage. Also, as technology advances, babies should become viable sooner and sooner. Also, as technology advances, babies may become viable earlier and earlier, but that only proves the flaw in this argument. If personhood depends on technology, then it isn’t based on the baby’s humanity, it’s based on the equipment around them. If an artificial womb someday allows a 20-week baby to survive, does that child magically gain the right to life the moment the machine works? That would mean the right to life is conditional and not inherent. That’s not how human rights work. Did people 100 years ago have less of a right to life because they didn’t have ventilators or other life-saving technology? Of course not. Human rights aren’t dependent on access to machines, they’re based on the dignity of being human.
You Get Personhood When You Feel Pain: While medical evidence shows that fetal pain perception isn’t possible until around 24–25 weeks (some clinicians argue for earlier), this argument isn’t about whether the unborn can feel pain, it’s about whether pain should determine a person’s right to life. So people who cannot feel pain (like coma patients) do not have personhood? Let’s say you’re confident that in 9 months the coma patient will come out of his or her coma, can you still kill them just because they cannot feel pain in that moment? Furthermore, do animals (because they feel pain) have personhood? Should we include animals to be equal to humans?
You Get Personhood When You Have Had the Ability to Feel Pain: So those who cannot feel pain because of a genetic problem can be killed? Then a child born with congenital insensitivity to pain (a real genetic disorder) would never cross that threshold and could, by this rule, be killed. Also, who determines what pain is? What is the threshold for pain?
We Can Kill a Person Who Has Lost All Brain Function, An Early Fetus Has No Brain Function: Some people argue that since we remove life support from brain-dead patients (those with no brain activity), we should also be able to abort a fetus who hasn’t developed brain function yet. This can be a tricky rebuttal for the conservative, but it’s really a simple answer: Because the difference is no more vs not yet. It’s a different moral category. It is different because there is no more that you can do for that person at the end of their life than someone who has not yet been completely grown as a human. Put simply, A brain-dead patient has irreversibly lost the capacity for life, there is no potential left. But an unborn child at the beginning of life hasn’t developed that capacity yet, and still has the natural potential to grow, develop, and live.
Treating Humans as More Valuable Just Because They’re Human Is Speciesist and Morally Problematic: This is an argument from the idea that humans and animals do not carry different moral value. The term ‘speciesist’ was popularized by Peter Singer, who argues that giving all humans greater moral value than animals, just because they are human, is an unjust bias. It’s like racism, but based on species not race. But this collapses the moment you recognize that humans do carry unique moral value, not because of bias, but because of what we are. The speciesist argument puts every organism on the same moral playing field, so then we have to decide what personhood is based on traits or what the Declaration of Independence says. If it’s traits, then any of the above could happen, such as some animals (like pigs, dolphins, or apes) scoring higher than human newborns or severely disabled humans, making them more of a ‘person.’
The ‘personhood’ argument is usually a desperate attempt from the pro choice activist to define their own set of parameters around what a person is or should be considered as without any moral justification. The goal is often to find the most abstract or specific argument that will defeat the pro-life side, even if there is no moral or scientific backing.
The Potential Person Argument
There’s another argument that Matt Walsh made, that while it is not as concrete as the “Declaration of Independence Argument,” it can work well along side it. Watch Matt Walsh, a popular conservative commentator and podcast host, break down this conservative argument as it relates to personhood.
Matt Walsh essentially said that IF we concede that personhood begins at birth or sometime after birth, which is a huge intellectual leap, then shouldn’t that potential person be the second most special thing on earth, (more than gold), and we shouldn’t just go around killing it?
If life is so valuable that we need to give people bodily autonomy in their pregnancies, then why wouldn’t a potential life be almost as valuable?
Again, this is not the clearest or strongest argument against the personhood debate, but it’s definitely a good thought experiment and can work well with other arguments.
The Historical Argument: Every Injustice Begins by Denying Someone’s Humanity
If it is not recognized that human beings have inherent dignity from a source above us, God, and that we have that inherent right to life because we are human, then it opens the door to injustice. History shows us what can happen when we deny someone’s humanity:
- In American history, slaves were not seen as persons until the 14th amendment where they were interpreted as fully person. Slaves were not recognized as persons under law, allowing horrific abuse to be justified legally and culturally.
- Under the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision in 1857, the Supreme Court ruled that African Americans were not citizens and had no rights under the Constitution. The government declared an entire class of people legally inferior.
- In Nazi Germany, Jews, disabled individuals, and others were declared “untermenschen” (subhuman), and thus not worthy of rights or protection. The state redefined who counted as a person and once people were no longer considered fully human, extermination became policy.
- In 19th-century Britain and America, women had no legal identity apart from their husbands. They couldn’t vote, hold property, or be fully recognized as independent persons under the law.
Just because legal systems can and have declared groups of humans to be “non-persons,” doesn’t make it morally right. Every major injustice in history began when society redefined who counted as a person and who didn’t. When we start deciding whose life is valuable based on convenience, traits, or location, we don’t evolve morally, we repeat history’s worst mistakes.
The Bottom Line
- The ‘personhood’ argument is a desperate attempt from the pro-choice activist to define their own set of parameters around what a person is or should be considered as without any moral justification.
- The Declaration of Independence is the best way to legally define personhood. It states that all men are CREATED equal, that they are endowed by their CREATOR. This means, according to the Declaration of Independence, that being a person starts at the moment of their creation, conception, and their right to life is from God, not humans or government.
- Among the many traits that pro-choice activists try to use to define personhood, they don’t make sense morally or logically. You don’t become a person by earning it through traits. You are a person because you are a member of the human family. That’s the only consistent, objective standard that protects everyone.
- Even if the pro-choice activist is allowed to make the moral and logical leap to define personhood by his or her standards, the popular arguments still do not hold up.
- Even if the ‘traits’ argument is conceded to the pro-choice side, another logical leap is still needed: If the fetus is merely a potential person, why should this potential person not be protected? Why is it not the second most valuable thing on Earth, second to being a human?
- Atrocities have been committed in history because some subset of the human race has not been considered to be persons. When we separate being a human being from being a person, the results are always catastrophic.
When we separate personhood from human nature, we open the door to injustice. But if every human being has intrinsic dignity from the moment of conception, then the unborn are not problems to be solved. They are people to be protected.