Secular Arguement Against Abortion

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“Sentience” is poorly defined and even more poorly understood. Some people make fine philosophical distinctions among sentience, consciousness, self-awareness, and cognition, whereas others are more careless in using these terms. Fortunately, we need not argue here over how to define these concepts. In whatever sense the pro-choicer means the word he chooses, it invariably has to do with some sort of mental activity. We can distinguish among three levels of “having” mental activity, and, for a dialectical defense of the pro-life position, the distinction among these three levels is more important than distinctions among different types of mental activity. The first of these levels is to be mentally active. This means that one is actively exercising the mental process in question. The second is to possess an immediate capacity for the particular type of mental activity. This means that, though one may not currently be performing the mental process, one has all the necessary neurological structures in place to do so within a relatively short period of time. The third is to possess an ultimate capacity for a particular mental activity. To have this “ultimate” capacity is to be the sort of living being that can be mentally active, regardless of whether or not one is presently exercising that capacity (or even ever will). All humans possess the ultimate capacity for rationality, sentience, or any type of fundamentally human mental activity from conception. If the pro-choicer has in mind such an ultimate capacity, a pro-lifer might be able to agree with his statement that personhood depends on mental activity. However, since the pro-choicer probably does not think that zygotes are persons, he must not be speaking of an ultimate capacity. Rather, he must mean that personhood depends either on being sentient or on some sort of immediate capacity for sentience. Below
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