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Abortion: Is it Possible to be both Pro-life and Pro-Choice? Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan

Decent Essays
In this paper, I will investigate the right to life for embryo based on Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s article “Abortion: Is it Possible to be both “Pro-life” and “Pro-Choice”?” My conclusion is an embryo is a potential person thus it has the right to life. Sagan and Druyan argue that embryo does not have human characteristics; therefore it is acceptable to abort it. I will show that embryo is at least a potential person, so it has the right to life.
First, I want to convince embryo may not be a person. If “person” here, means biologically a member of human beings, then after 14 days when primitive streak or after 16 days when gastrulation (Damschen, Gómez-Lobo and Schönecker), an embryo is certainly a person, because at this point, the
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So far I assert that an individual who has personhood may not be a human beings or a human being may not have personhood, the individual could be another species, or even beyond existence. This means some human beings in biological definition are not essentially a person. For example, hydatidiform mole, anencephalic, Siamese twins, even fetus-in-fetu, or some fetuses develop to a certain stage but discontinue, and even some patient in brain-dead state(unlike vegetative), all of them can be known biologically as human beings, but they would not be considered as a person since they do not have rational.
Notably, even in today’s general understanding, avoid using substance or essence of rationality to talk about the person, instead with the way does the object have rational function, to determine whether it has the personhood. However the concept of personhood, in fact, is inseparable from the meaning of some kind of metaphysical entity. It is more and more obvious when discussing about personal identity problem, that personhood at different points in time all have the identity. One person cannot have the same identity with more than two different individuals.
Finally, and perhaps most crucially, “what is a potential person” or “who has the potential to develop into a
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