Re: Quick question for pro life people.
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Now the question becomes whether or not that entity is worthy of protection from destruction. Some may phrase this as whether that entity has achieved personhood. That is the key divide between those for and against abortion.
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No. This is a pro-life agenda question, and it's unfortunate that it has been taken seriously in the US at the level that it has. The idea of "personhood" doesn't really exist outside the religious fundamentalist worldview. It has no medical or scientific relevance, and the secular world largely dismisses the notion that some magical property of "personhood" is imbued in a fetus at some magical point in time. There are many different things that happen at many different stages in development, and the question of which of these things have some kind of ethical relevance is complex and usually dependent on the finer points of a person's individual system of morality. The attempt to short-circuit these complexities with a concept of "personhood" that is poorly defined and extremely contingent, and almost always dictated by religious figures with strong political agendas, is disingenuous.
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