Here’s the thing: no pro-choicer I know denies that a fetus is human; we deny that it is a person. And there is a distinct difference.
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“Human” can refer to so many things other than a person. Our cells are human. We have human emotions that aren’t experienced, as far as the current evidence shows, by other animals to the same degree as us. We have human culture and technology. “Human” is such a broad term that to suggest that a fetus is not human is really quite ridiculous. That being said, not all fetuses are human, just the ones that share human DNA. But DNA does not a person make.
Note how she carefully avoids saying that a fetus is *a* human, as opposed to just human.
Pro-choicers seem to try to avoid the fact that a fetus is *a* human.
A person is completely different from a human and although a person is also human, “human” is not necessarily a person. To suggest that they are synonyms is to conflate their meanings. People share a number of characteristics, which while not all are present in each person, most people will indeed share most of the characteristics. People have emotions and thoughts, they experience sensation, often through their 5 senses but not always. People have the capacity to learn, to form opinions, to have likes and dislikes. Even small infants and children have many of these qualities in at least a rudimentary sense. People also have individual bodies that are self-sustaining. When they are not self-sustaining, we have medical intervention that can take over to some extent, but when ultimately our bodies lose too much of their ability to self-sustain, we die.
Here's the problem.
Our western human rights and moral system is based on the intrinsic value of a human being.
The moment a human being exists, he is intrinsically valuable.
You can't argue that a being is intrinsically valuable, but that it only has value at a certain point in time. That would be contradictory.
So all human beings are valuable in and of themselves the moment their existence begins.
Their existence begins at conception.
The only qualification one needs to be intrinsically valuable is to be a human being. No other qualification is required.
That is what is meant by "all men are created equal". When they are created, that is, at conception, they have equal value.
History shows that human beings are denied personhood in order to be able to kill and oppress them. This is just another example.
