PowerLine is understandably outraged.

Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are “morally irrelevant” and ending their lives is no different to abortion,

The last part of that statement is almost certainly correct.  If killing a fetus isn’t murder, killing a newborn isn’t.  Or, at least, almost never.  I even know precisely when it would be murder (although pinpointing the actual transition is impossible). 

Mr. Hinderaker asks,

How old does a child have to be before he or she becomes a “person?”

I’ve seen evidence that Mr. Hinderaker can think quite ably, but then he emits brain farts like this.  “How old does a child have to be before he or she becomes a “person?”” 

That is both a conversational and logical non sequitur.  Try this:  how many times does a woman have to have sex before she becomes pregnant?  Or, more to the point:  how old is a child when it hits puberty?

Mr. Hideraker addresses a developmental change in chronological terms.  Why?  Obviously “personhood” and pregnancy and puberty are qualitative states, not quantitative ones.

Agreed?  Obviously.  Yet it’s never acknowledged.  Then everyone, pro-and-anti-abortion alike, ignores an obvious and vital fact:

No two creatures mature at exactly the same rate.

So, if the Question is: “how old to become a person?”, the Answer must be:  “depends.”  Assuming a fetus isn’t a person, after birth they all get there at a slightly different rate.  Killing that six-week-old might be no different than a first trimester abortion, but killing this five-week-old is outright murder.   

If we’re not all human at conception then we don’t all become human at the same time, either.  So maybe we should…I dunno…define personhood first?   

“Hey, let’s have a footrace.”

“To where?”

“What?”

“How far is the race?” 

“Still not following you.”

“Where are we racing to?? Where’s the finish line?”

Where does human life begin?

That is the question.  It is the absolute moral obligation of any “pro-choice” activist to have a ready answer to that question.

Isn’t it?

I honestly do not know how pro-life activists can be so eternally stupid.  They keep running around in circles instead of insisting on a defined race.  And so these “ethicists” keep moving the goal posts, the finish line.  As long as they don’t have to define humanity they can keep expanding the ranks of the non-human, the Other.

Humanity begins either at conception or upon attaining self-awareness.  Self-awareness will always procede the ability to communicate self-awareness.  So how long is a baby conscious of itself before you see that it has become self-conscious?

Seems like an important question to me.  Still.  Maybe, to an ethicist, that just proves that I

do not have a “moral right to life”.