Fun fact about me: I think adults wearing onesies look really weird and creepy. Kids in onesies are super cute, babies in onesies are adorable, but adults in onesies just look…wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on why for the longest time, until one day it hit me: adults’ arms and legs are longer in proportion to their torsos than babies and children. If an adult reaches their arm up, the top of their head will probably be roughly level with their elbow. If you stretch a newborn baby’s arm up to its fullest extent, however, their hand barely reaches the top of their head. So an adult wearing a onesie looks all arms and legs – and that just looks creepy and wrong. (I will die on this hill).

Different arm to leg ratios is just one difference between humans, of course. Other things happen as we age: our eyes get proportionately smaller relative to our faces, while our ears and nose get proportionately larger. Our bones fuse into each other. Men grow beards, our hair goes grey, we get wrinkles. There are lots of different ways that humans look at different points in their lives, but they all look just how they are supposed to look for the age and stage they are at.

I began reflecting on this fact recently when I was thinking back on several conversations I’ve had with pro-choice friends where I shared the Equal Rights Argument, or my regret analysis on personhood. In my experience, people often see the force of the arguments, but can’t quite bring themselves to conclude that they can no longer stand over their pro-choice views. There’s just something about following a somewhat abstract argument about personhood all the way to the conclusion that an embryo or foetus is a person that seems a bridge too far for many people.

If you are a pro-choice person in this position, you are not alone. It is not uncommon to find it quite hard to feel like abortion is wrong. We can repeat consistency arguments to ourselves, reminding ourselves that allowing abortion means denying personhood to at least some born people too (unless we are willing to sacrifice consistency), but that doesn’t always bring any kind of emotional force. The pro-life position can still feel counterintuitive, or even wrong. Why is this?

From my own experience, and from what I’ve encountered others saying, it seems to be something to do with the fact that the smallest pre-born humans don’t really look anything like, well, humans. Informing people of facts around foetal development is a powerful pro-life tool, and I have seen the impact it can make on people when they learn that babies have a heartbeat from the fifth week of pregnancy (three weeks after fertilisation), or have arms and legs beginning to appear just two weeks later. However, what really seems to trip people up is very early abortions – how can we say a zygote, which really is a “clump of cells”, is a person? How can we say a tiny embryo, which looks a bit like a tube stuck to a glomph that will become a placenta, is a person? This is where people’s intuition just screams “No, this is insane, specks of cells are not people!”.

What’s the best way to respond to this? The first point I like to make is to think about what exactly we mean by “clump of cells”. In particular, I like to point out that – we are all just clumps of cells! Is it not accurate, on at least some level, to describe me as a bunch of cells and biochemical reactions? The reason claiming personhood for embryos or foetuses seems weird can’t be purely because they’re a collection of cells – so am I, and yet we’re all OK assigning personhood to the clump of cells called “Muireann”. Might it therefore seem weird to do the same for embryos and foetuses because they’re a collection of cells that looks a certain way?

This brings us back to where I started: there are actually lots of ways for clumps of cells that make up human persons to “look”. We all look different to each other, depending not only on our genetic code but also on our stage of development – but we all look exactly how we’re supposed to look! This is no less true for human beings before they are born. A six week embryo looks nothing like a two year old toddler – but it looks exactly like a six week old embryo, which is just what it should look like!

Now, humans do seem, of course, to have some difficulty accepting that human forms that differ from the ones we’re used to seeing are people. For whatever reason, it just feels natural to treat humans that look like us as persons, and to treat humans that don’t look like us as different, perhaps even as non-persons. This natural tendency is pretty pervasive, it shows up in every era and culture, and it has played a huge, and devastating, role in history. It’s called racism.

For those who are taken aback by this claim, stop and ask yourself: If you see the force of the Equal Rights Argument, and therefore see why consciousness, for example, is not the grounds of personhood, why is it that you are so incredulous at the idea that a foetus or an embryo could be a person? If it’s not that they just don’t look like us, what is it? If you have another answer, do let us know!

Muireann