#aimee murphy

Let’s look at the personhood discussion in brief: personhood is a binary condition, you can’t be half a person or 3/5 of a person, you either are a person or you aren’t. We consider human beings, as a species, to retain the values of personhood, regardless of disability, usefulness, innocence. Even if we are unable to know when personhood exists, we must still err on the side of caution so as to protect personhood wherever it does exist. If you can’t know whether the preborn human being is a person or not, or exactly when personhood is imbued, it doesn’t make sense to insist that killing the preborn human being is licit. You don’t shoot into a bush without knowing if the creature rustling about is a human or a fox or a pheasant: if we can’t know for absolutely certain that what we are killing is a person or a non-person, then we should err on the side of caution and not allow that killing. It’s kind of like with calling for a moratorium on the death penalty: a lot of people support bringing an end to the death penalty because — well, we’re human. And as long as humans are prone to error, there is a huge risk of killing an innocent with capital punishment. Many anti-DP proponents (who are also pro-choice, ironically) believe that it would follow, therefore, that we should err on the side of caution and not kill with that method at all if we run the risk of even killing one innocent. Let’s just be consistent, y’all. For life.