Pro-choice morality

Yes, the most morally coherent pro-choice position is that fetuses are not people and that abortion has nothing to do with murder, but there is space for the problematic position that fetuses are semi-people so abortion is bad, but not bad like murdering a full-person.  Pro-choice people seem to tend toward this latter view but don't usually articulate it very well, and those who take my position - that fetuses have very little to do with what we care about when we say "person" - tend to sound too harsh for public rhetoric.  It's a life, but it's not a *human* life, we say, and then peoplelook at their ultrasounds and saw "awww, but look at the little fingers".  Alternately, perhaps they listen to their pastor who tells them about brain functioning and hearts beating and the like.

When does the clearly non-human blastocyst become undeniably human?  Well, there's no fact of the matter, since humans develop into their humanity.  If one believed in a soul, one might say "the moment at which the soul cleaves to the body," but it's notoriously difficult to measure the supernatural.  I think a rational place might be the point at which the baby acquires a personality - for which we might establish statistically significant number of days out of the womb.  Jews once named babies eight days after they were born, which made a lot of cultural sense in a time when infant mortality was huge.  Of course, I think birth itself is a better choice.  Whether a baby is premature or full-term, being out in the world entails a period of rapid neurological change that is a necessary precursor to recognizable personhood.  The foundation of all this is the idea that what we care about with humans is personhood capable of the basics: love, friendship, joy, anger, and so on.  Newborn babies aren't capable of these things, granted, but very swiftly they shade into that territory, so swiftly I think it's best to draw the line at birth.  Dogs aren't (and will never be) fully capable of these things so we give them second-tier rights.  If we ever had a super-dog,however, capable of fully-articulated love and friendship, it seems obvious that it would be incumbent on us to extend to that dog the rights and protections we offer genetic humans - because the dog's humanity is in its mind and soul (in the non-supernatural sense).  Judging humanity by genetics is an insult to human love, in my opinion.

Keep in mind your cuticles and hair were once living human cells.  Do we really want to equate them with human life?