Sentiency is key

Re: “Life is precious,” (PostBag, Oct 21).

In his letter, Paul asks the right and yet also difficult questions. If a human being is not in fact a person, either because it has never reached that point in development, or because something has happened to remove the personhood that had once obtained, then it cannot be murder to kill that person. If those responsible for the human being who is not a person make decision for best interest to painlessly end the life of the human who is not a person, how could that be wrong?

Paul points out that “more medical evidence is coming out showing that the unborn child can feel”. This is true. The evidence shows that the foetus can feel pain or has senses such as touch and hearing from an early point in development, as do the foetuses of rabbits, sheep and goats. Paul’s wilful vagueness is because the evidence for any characteristic of a person remains zero.

If merely having a heartbeat, more accurately, a detectable murmur in the gestational sac, is evidence of being a person, then there can be no doubt whatsoever that every pig, cow, chicken or fish with a strongly beating heart that we kill to turn into a tasty meal is every bit equally a person and fully deserving of the same legal protection as the sixweek old human foetuses of Texas.

There is no slippery slope that so worries Paul. Such talk of slippery slopes is a scare tactic by those who have no sound reasons to back up their unreasoning assault on the rights of actual human persons.

Society is, on the contrary, coming to care more about both actual human persons and also about the suffering of sentient living beings that are not persons. That is why capital punishment is on the way out. That is why animal lives are being increasing protected by legislation to prevent abuse and suffering on factory farms. That is why we are encouraged to put our suffering pets and livestock out of their misery with a quick, painless death.

The lives of all sentient animals matter. The lives of actual persons matter the most. Respecting the right to legal abortion on request gives greater respect to the lives of human persons.

FELIX QUI