Question

how is human dignity or personhood understood in arguments for and against abortion,genetic testing ,embryo selection ,and selective abortion ?

Answer 1

Personhood arguments, exclusive rather than inclusive in their understanding of human community, seem in many ways to have turned against the long and arduous history in which we have slowly learned to value and protect those who are least among us.

Overview

In ancient times, abortion, along with infanticide, was considered in the context of family planning, gender selection, population control, and the property rights of the patriarch. Rarely were the rights of the prospective mother, much less the prospective child, taken into consideration. Although generally legal, the morality of abortion, birth control and child abandonment (as a form of infanticide) was sometimes discussed. Then, as now, these discussions often concerned the nature of humankind, the existence of a soul, when life begins, and the beginning of human personhood.

While the practice of infanticide (as a form of family planning) has largely been eradicated in developed countries, birth control and abortion are still practiced, and their morality and legality continue to be debated. While modern debates about abortion retain some of the languages of these older debates, the terminology has often acquired new meanings.

Terminology

Many of the terms used in the debate are seen as political framing: terms used to validate one's own stance while invalidating the opposition's.

Appeals are often made in the abortion debate to the rights of the fetus, pregnant woman, or other parties. Such appeals can generate confusion if the type of rights is not specified (whether civil, natural, or otherwise) or if it is simply assumed that the right appealed to takes precedence over all other competing rights.

The appropriate terms with which to designate the human organism prior to birth are also debated. The medical terms "embryo" and "fetus" are seen by some anti-abortion advocates as dehumanizing, while everyday terms such as "baby" or "child" are viewed as sentimental by some pro-abortion advocates.

The use of the term "baby" to describe the unborn human organism is seen by some scholars as part of an effort to assign the organism agency. This assignation of agency functions to further the construction of fetal personhood.

Personhood

There are differences of opinion as to whether a zygote/embryo/fetus acquires "personhood" or was always a "person". If "personhood" is acquired, opinions differ about when this happens.

Traditionally, the concept of personhood entailed the soul, a metaphysical concept referring to a non-corporeal or extra-corporeal dimension of human being.Today,theconceptsof subjectivity and intersubjectivity, personhood, mind, and self have come to encompass a number of aspects of human being previously considered the domain of the "soul". Thus, while the historical question has been: when does the soul enter the body, in modern terms, the question could be put instead: at what point does the developing individual develop personhood or selfhood.

Since the zygote is genetically identical to the embryo, the fully formed fetus, and the baby, the notion of acquired personhood could lead to an instance of the Sorites paradox, also known as the paradox of the heap.

Fetal personhood

Although the two main sides of the abortion debate tend to agree that a human fetus is biologically and genetically human (that is, of the human species), they often differ in their view on whether or not a human fetus is, in any of various ways, a person. Pro-life supporters argue that abortion is morally wrong on the basis that a fetus is an innocent human person or because a fetus is a potential life that will, in most cases, develop into a fully functional human being. They believe that a fetus is a person upon conception. Others reject this position by drawing a distinction between human being and human person, arguing that while the fetusis innocent and biologically human, it is not a person with a right to life.

Understanding Human Dignity

Human dignity seems to be one of the few common values in our world of philosophical pluralism … The main hurdle at the moment is that there is not enough clarity about the meaning of human dignity. To provide it is the responsibility of all philosophers.

Feticide and the Erosion of Dignity

Dignity as empowerment then says nothing about the issue of feticide other than that each woman as a full agent is free to choose feticide or not depending on her own view of the good life. Fetuses as such are outside of the moral community. This, I take it, is the plain reading of their position. It is interesting then that these authors return to the issue of the moral status of embryos and fetuses, and attempt to open a door by which to grant them moral status after all. In order to do so they invoke “precautionary reasoning” that “requires agents to recognize duties to the unborn in proportion to the degree to which the unborn display characteristics associated with the ability to display agency”. While dignity as empowerment results in a very restricted conception of dignity, basic dignity as epistemic constraint could be charged with suffering from the opposite problem. That is, by granting some measure of moral status to all human specimens we risk diluting the notion of dignity completely.

embryo selection

Advances in human fertilisation and embryology have brought immense opportunities for medicine and human health. Technologies such as in vitro fertilisation (IVF), preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research have contributed to managing serious health conditions and their further development is now widely associated with improved health.

However, such ‘promised futures’ of improved health have not been the only vision of what these biomedical advances may bring. Both in philosophical and ethical debates and in more down-to-earth political discussions, criticism has been mounted that these technologies might lead to the violation and erosion of human dignity.

There are several reasons why we disapprove of bans on sex-selective abortions: Bans on sex-selective abortions are ineffective. Sex-selection bans do not prevent sexselective abortions. The bans distract from the real issue and fail to combat the underlying societal attitudes that devalue girls and underlying cultural pressures that cause individuals and couples to pursue sex-selective abortions.1 Bans on sex-selective abortions threaten women’s lives and health by making abortions harder to obtain for women who need them. Sex-selection abortion bans that contain criminal penalties make safe abortion services less available to all women by pressuring health care providers to restrict their practices in order to avoid possible criminal prosecution.2 Therefore, they may cause some women to seek unsafe, illegal abortions.