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In On The Moral and Legal Status of Abortion, author Mary Warren defends abortion on the grounds that fetuses are not persons and therefore have no moral rights. Warren defines personhood, the quality necessary to hold full moral rights, in five characteristics: (1) consciousness and the capacity to feel pain, (2) reasoning (developed problem solving), (3) self-motivated activity (4) the capacity to communicate and (5) the presence of self-concepts, and self-awareness. (Warren 55). Warren then further explains that while a person does not need to hold all, or any specific characteristic of the five, any being that does not hold any of the characteristics is certainly not a person (such as a fetus). While one may agree with Warren that the characteristics defined above may accurately describe a person, the ambiguous and unquantifiable nature of the characteristics may make them impossible to use in a legal sense and therefore irrelevant to the legality of abortion.
The first characteristic, consciousness, is particularly tricky because scientifically there is no test or definition that has been accepted to measure the term. Does an ant, for example have consciousness because it has the capacity to feel pain? Warren even states that A man or woman whose consciousness has been permanently obliterated but who remains alive is a human being which is no longer a person. (Warren 56) Yet, would this mean that person who is in a coma is presently not a person because he/she is not conscious? This is a dubious claim and defining how to legislate consciousness remains difficult.
None of the characteristics mentioned above are binary conditions, in that one either has the condition or does not but rather exist on a continuum. Reasoning and the ability to communicate for example are characteristics that develop and mature extremely slow in fetuses/humans and there are no specific indicators as to when they are possessed in a manner that Warren would find reliable. Drawing cutoff points for reasoning and communication would inevitably become arbitrary and blurry and defining whether or not a being has a moral right to life on arbitrary standards would be difficult.
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