The personhood issue

I am delighted that Ivan Padovani (March 19) feels he has fathomed the "truth" regarding the "fundamental issues" of the abortion debate but, understandably, disappointed that he appears convinced that I am unable to see the light.

According to him, a living fertilised human egg, which is produced at conception, is "both living and human" - a correct but, ultimately, tautological observation, if ever there was one. This leads him to conclude that a fertilised egg is a human being and, therefore, fully deserving of the "social" status of personhood.

While declaring, correctly, that the concept of personhood is non-scientific and, therefore, arbitrary, he summarily dismisses the opinion of several leading bioethicists, that personhood cannot exist without a measure of conscious capacity, preferring instead his own arbitrary opinion that personhood begins at conception.

Now, this is muddled thinking at its worst! In one breath, Dr Padovani uses the science of conception to make his point, in the next, states that personhood is non-scientific, then he dismisses as pseudo-scientific the relationship between the scientific development of the human brain and the onset of personhood and, finally, declares that the non-scientific status of personhood is dependent, exclusively, on the scientific reality of conception!

Naturally, he makes no attempt to counter my claim that, in all advanced societies, the end of personhood is taken to occur at brain death, which would signify that the beginning of personhood must, logically, occur at "brain birth" and that a fertilised egg is not a person at all, only that it has the potential to become one, if allowed to develop fully.

This distinction between a potential and actual person is evident even in the laws of Malta, arguably the sole-remaining bastion of anti-choice philosophy in the western world. The maximum prison sentence that a woman could incur for aborting her pregnancy is three years. Significantly, the maximum sentence that she could incur for infanticide (murder of a child during its first year) is 20 years. It would appear that, even here in Malta, the difference in status between two beings, separated only by the length of a birth-canal and to which reference is made with regular flippancy by the anti-choice lobby, could not be any starker.

In practically all other countries, a keener perception of social history prevails. Having realised several years ago that abortion is as old as civilisation itself (in fact, it is known that the ancient Greeks used abortifacients, such as silphium) and that its criminalisation just drove it underground, with serious consequences for the women involved (abortion statisticians have concluded that illegal abortion figures were as high in the pre-Roe vs. Wade era as legal abortion figures in later years), they decided it was infinitely more humane to decriminalise it.

Although, as Dr Padovani states, abortion is not a human or civil right, as it appears in no act or convention, its legal status is secure and unlikely to change in the medium- to long-term.

"Whither now," Dr Padovani ponders. I should suggest that he used his "rigorous analysis of the exact biological and social status of the unborn" to petition, firstly, the government that a foetus has the same moral and legal status as a person and, later on, devote his energies to the rest of the world.

As for the Maltese woman with an unwanted pregnancy, who feels desolate in her moment of difficult decision-making, a legal abortion is available, should she so desire, just a short, one-off, inexpensive catamaran ride away. It could have been far worse.