The performativity of personhood

Abstract

"Debates in bioethics around abortion and the moral status of the human fetus frequently take recourse to the concept of ‘personhood’ as a means of moral arbitration: whether the fetus can be properly identified as a person is taken to determine what can be done to it, primarily, whether it can be killed or not. In the tradition of Peter Singer and Michael Tooley, Alberto Guibilini and Francesca Minerva extend this logic to defend the idea of ‘after-birth abortion’. They claim that, insofar as abortion, (by definition prior to birth), is morally permissible, killing a newborn should also be permissible, since ‘[t] he moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus, that is, neither can be considered a “person” in a morally relevant sense’"