After birth abortion?

[Mister Agenda]

If being a collection of human cells was enough to qualify something as a human being, my cheek scrapings would qualify as a human being. HeLa cells have human DNA, does that make them a human being? Surely there is more to being human a human BEING than having human cells.

They will try and argue that it has unique DNA .This is unconvincing refer back to my clone argument and the argument of difference by degree . 

Identical twins are a problem for that argument as well. Are they less human because their DNA is less unique? Is it okay to abort one of them? If not, genetic uniqueness is not an argument anti-abortionists really believe themselves.

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So while I don’t condone infanticide this does bring up a few interesting ideas: what is personhood? And are babies “persons” in the same way older humans are?

And yes, if you rely on personhood as your justification for abortion then it could be argued that infanticide is morally permissible. But I think that’s a less interesting discussion. This is partially because I abhor killing anything, and infanticide is particularly difficult to justify.

Like lots of things to do with humans (and other organisms), I think it's a spectrum. Something that is merely a fertilized egg is clearly not a human being. Something that can pass a driver's test clearly is. At exactly what point the organism went from being a microorganism to a person is a judgment call that depends on what criteria you use. I'm not sure a newborn infant is clearly a person in the same sense that someone capable of graduating kindergarten is, but it's well on its way and the bodily autonomy argument is moot at that point. I think ethically at that point infanticide is unjustifiable unless it's a 'Sophie's Choice' (for example; in some circumstances, parents could literally be faced with the choice of risking starvation of the children they already had if they tried to raise one more).