Footnotes

• Competing interests None.

• Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

• ↵i George doubts that the millions of people who support abortion rights do so because they deny that non-rational human beings are persons, but I can find very few people today who are not aware that the fetus is a fellow member of the species Homo sapiens. Most of those who are pro-choice believe that the fetus needs to develop further—develop a brain, feel pain, have a heartbeat, become independent of her mother, etc—before she can be considered a full member of the moral community. This view has also played out in attitudes toward those like Terri Shaivo, who many considered to be less than a full person because she, though obviously a functioning human organism, had irrevocably lost what made her a person.