There is No Sharp Transition to Personhood

The belief that fertilized eggs qualify as people reflects an intuition that there really is no clear dividing line for the concept of personhood. It is much like the paradox of the heap: if one grain at a time is removed from a pile of sand, at what point does it stop being a pile? There are many ways to approach this question, but I favor the fuzzy logic answer: that even one grain of sand has some degree of "pileness" to it, two grains have twice as much, three grains three times as much, etc. The salient point for this post is that there is no sudden transition, something many people have difficulty contemplating. So, is an egg a person? "Somewhat", while unsatisfying as an answer, is nonetheless accurate. A fertilized egg? More so. A baby? Yet more. People attempt to use the ability to survive outside a mother's body as a sharp transition, but even that is artificial: an infant is still utterly dependent on a large input of care and resources, let alone one born right at the edge of viability. More still is required for them to attain anything approaching their full potential.

The problem with extending the notion of legal personhood to ever earlier stages of human development is that it is an argument from potential. Every egg, every sperm has the potential to become a person, but a policy aimed at bringing as many to term as possible would quickly lay waste to the planet. In a world of limited resources, potential life has a finite worth, which by definition means it cannot automatically trump all other concerns. This seemingly heartless conclusion is part of our own biology: many miscarriages are induced by defects that would not be immediately fatal to the fetus but would yield young so weak as to not be worth the associated opportunity cost or risk to the mother. Exactly what the value of a potential person may be is not only beyond the scope of this post, but is arguably impossible to answer definitively owing to the subjective and deeply personal nature of the many competing factors. My goal is instead to dispel the absolute thinking that seems to frequently accompany such issues. Life may be precious, but, on this planet at least, it is far from priceless.