Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1307485
3 LETTERS & EDITORIAL maltatoday | SUNDAY • 8 NOVEMBER 2020 Mikiel Galea Letters & Clarifications Abortion and personhood: objective facts A recent correspondent (Prof. Isabel Stabile, Letters, 1 November) voicing her support for abortion expressed an opinion that the human embryo is not yet a person but only has the poten- tial to become a person at some later stage, presumably after birth. This is an interesting concept which merits further analysis based on objective facts. Consider first a living adult human representing a typical specimen of the human race. There is universal agreement that such an individu- al has personhood and therefore entitlement to full human rights foremost of which is the right to life. That's fact. In say, 24 hours' time from now this individual will have irreversibly aged biologically by the same time interval; he will have gained anoth- er day's life experiences which to a greater or lesser degree (depending on the type of experiences and his responses) will have influenced his outlook; character/personality; abil- ities etc. In other words, although this is still the same individual, in 24 hours' time he will not be exactly the same person that he is today but an evolved/changed version of the per- son of today. That's fact. It is therefore legitimate to say that today's person has the potential to become tomorrow's evolved person (whatever that my turn out to be) provided that he stays alive. The same reasoning can also be applied in retrospect, namely, yesterday's per- son had the potential then to evolve into today's person and because he survived, he actually did. That's fact. So now we have an individual whose personhood has evolved with the passage of time and under the in- fluences of life's experiences. For all of us this is our common first-hand personal experience and therefore we can all relate directly to this fact. In other words, personhood is not a static unchangeable state of being but rather a continuous process of evolution (or sadly in some cases regression, but nonetheless still a process) accompanying/defining the existence of each one of us and mak- ing us what we are at any given point in time. In most cases the change in per- sonhood from day to day will be im- perceptibly small but there it will be nonetheless. Think back ten, twenty, thirty years in your lifetime and ask: were you then exactly the same per- son that you are today? If the answer is yes then you must be made of glass. Continuing the process back to when our adult was an adolescent; child; infant; unborn (at whatever stage you'd care to consider); and finally the initial cells at conception it is clear that the process of person- hood with its potential to evolve into the next stage is at work at each and every stage and starts immediately with the first two cells at conception which have the potential to become the next four cells provided they survive, then eight cells, then sixteen and so on. That's fact. The first combined cells immedi- ately after conception are the initial stage of the development of self, the person and are therefore an insep- arable part of the whole process of development of personhood itself. If any reader has any doubt about this, they only have to ask themselves where they would be right now if in their case their mother had decid- ed to terminate the pregnancy the morning after or at any other stage for that matter. Personhood isn't something that's just clicked on into being in accord- ance to what's convenient at some point in the existence of the human individual. Clearly any notion that personhood starts after birth is pure- ly an arbitrary and therefore subjec- tive position which has no basis in reality. Abortion terminates the process of personhood. John Muscat Birkirkara