The Importance Of Personhood

This section started with the questions of why personhood is relevant to the abortion debate, what is a person and how can one identify personhood? Personhood is relevant because without an idea what is a person we cannot have a judgment whether foetuses are persons. Having a moral judgment about abortion seems heavily relies on the personhood of foetuses. We proposed that the arguments on the personhood of the foetus needs to be classified differently from the manner in which this task is carried out in the current literature. This was argued on the basis that the arguments from the intrinsic (essential) property of personhood are not making an argument from potentiality. For the proponents of the intrinsic (essential) property arguments,

But this is problematic for two reasons: first we started our discussion with making distinction between abortion and contraception. Second, this is very unintuitive if one think that even sperms are persons and consuming contraceptive pills are killing. Even some scholars in Abrahamic religions who advocate the idea of ensoulments do not support the personhood of sperms! In response, one can appeal to the theory of degrees of personhood explaining that sperms can be person but in a very vague sense. However, one can again object that the whole point is that when exactly personhood

One can simply shows that these two arguments relies on the essentiality of personhood for a foetus with a potential future even if that potential is not actualized. One the other hand, it seems that the Marquis and Boonin arguments are similar in the sense that both refers to one thing with different terminology. Boonin is reacted to Marquis argument by building his argument on the same platform. In fact, both start with one base and have the same intuition. Marquis refers to the value and goodness of future while Boonin refers to the interest and desire. The most important difference between Marquis and Boonin is related to the scientific point. Marquid is quiet about how one can find the value of future but Boonin appeals to science to identify the interest and desire of foetuses. They both at least believe that abortion at some point (after 25-30 weeks) is wrong. Boonin makes a different rout by applying scientific evidence stating that before week 25-30 abortion is