Is a 22-week-old unborn baby a person? What about a baby born after only 21 weeks and 6 days in the womb?
The question of personhood should be even clearer after Amillia Sonja Taylor left the hospital as a fairly healthy 4-month-old.
If you argue that Sonja is a person, but that it is acceptable to abort babies at her same stage of development, then you place the issue of personhood on nothing more than location of the individual.
Is it logically to argue that somehow “magically” Sonja became a person upon leaving her mother’s womb? I say “magically” because no change has taken place to Sonja except where she is located. To argue that Sonja could have been killed minutes before being born, but not a second afterward is difficult logic to defend.
Many place the limit of abortions on the viability of the baby. Here we have the smallest child ever to survive. Who’s to say tomorrow a smaller or younger baby cannot survive with advances in science?
Many say that because the child is part of his mother and is provided for completely by the mother that the child is not a person. Again, simply an issue of location. Disagree? Here’s a simply question. Is it right to kill a baby who has been born, but is still attached to the umbilical cord? That child is still receiving everything from the mother and has only moved from inside the womb to outside.
The life and presence of Sonja continues to raise the quesiton of whether we as a culture will allow the location of a child to determine their personhood.
