Infanticide

Discussion of abortion often (though not always) revolves around the question of at which point a fetus becomes a person.

But this may be the wrong question to ask. What we really want to know is at which point a human being becomes a person. It's possible that fetuses never become persons. Perhaps humans become persons only after birth. I don't endorse this view, but I do believe that it's worth considering.

Most people are agreed that birth is not the borderline between non-person and person. The time of birth does not depend solely on how developed the fetus is, and that makes it a bad candidate for the borderline. But given that birth is not the borderline, why assume that the borderline must be before birth? Personhood might hinge on all sorts of traits. There's no reason, in advance of discussion, to assume that the relevant traits are ones that appear before birth rather than after. Development isn't something that occurs only during pregnancy, and it's therefore possible that the important stages of develpoment occur, say, during early childhood, or potentially even adolescence.

Just to be clear, I reiterate: I'm not defending the truth of such a view, merely defending the possibility of the truth of such a view. No doubt it's repulsive, but is it false?