"The unborn are not potential humans; they are humans with potential."
This is the clearest expression of this simple, yet critical, truth. Whether or not someone is a person is dependent on only one attribute: whether or not they are a human. There has been much mischief wrought by people who, for various motives, have sought to dehumanize the unborn: one of the methods they have used is to argue that there is a moment in time when the biological unity which came into being at the moment of conception now becomes a "person". Certainly, an embryo does not yet have power of sentience; a baby does not yet have power of intellect; a toddler does not yet have power of will; a child does not yet have power of reproduction; an adolescent does not yet have power of emotional control; a college student does not yet have power of financial independence; and so on, and so forth. The adventure of life, in which various potencies are actualized – some by ourselves, others by other persons, all ultimately by Pure Actuality Himself – is precisely that: an adventure. But an adventure cannot happen without the adventurer. I, and every other human person in history, came from a specific biological unity: an embryo. A human person's moral worth does not derive from the subjective opinion of another human person, or a collective opinion of such human persons, but rather the objective fact of his or her *existence*. To argue that "moral worth is contingent on sentience" is to miss the very essence of moral thought, and perhaps the very essence of all rational thinking itself: causality. For if there is moral worth tied to sentience, how could there not also be moral worth tied to that biological unity which has a potency, grounded in the already existing life itself, for sentience? If, in fact, a person will not allow the harming of a little girl because he marvels at the little girl's capacity for joy, laughter, sorrow, and – that most human attribute – wonder, how could he not also desire to protect that little girl when she has not yet actualized her built-in potency for such capacities for joy, laughter, sorrow, and wonder?
The great irony, or, perhaps, the great tragedy, of this abuse of the word "person", is the mockery it attempts to make of that noble and dignified word. For the meaning of the word "person" itself developed out of Christian meditation on the Trinity. The Church Fathers asked: how could there be one divine nature, yet three distinct entities within that divine nature? The Church wrestled with that question – and still does – but progress was, slowly but surely, made: the entities were persons. And so, when it is said that the human is made in the image and likeness of God, the revolution which the Gospel spread to those it baptized was powered by the fundamental belief that the human being was a person, made for relationality, made for love, in the same way that God Himself is a relationality, in the same way that God Himself is Love.
If children are to be accepted not as burdens but as gifts, then so too should the unborn. If, in fact, we are to treat, individually, in our own spiritualities, human life as a gift – we must also recognize in other human lives, no matter how small or how weak, the same rights which we trust we have ourselves.
