"An acorn is not an oak tree."

To quote a very old article on the topic that I read in grad school, in the fictitious discipline of normative moral philosophy.

A Defense of Abortion

Frozen Embryos Have a Right to Live

It's pretty clear that the doctrine folks rely on in asserting personhood of the embryo and in fact of the zygote from conception is that personhood attaches to the immaterial human soul, or that it attaches to the body in virtue of the presence of such a soul.

Hovering in the background, of course, is the doctrine that rights attach to persons, and only to persons.

It's also pretty clear that a pretty strong majority of Americans accept these doctrines as well as personhood from conception.

But perhaps someone should tell Nick Loeb that the Supremes who decided Roe did not accept personhood from conception, so (I suppose) according to current law the assertion that embryos have a right to life is false.

Too, something can perfectly well be both alive and property.

Consider your goldfish, if you have one; or someone else's, if you don't.

Fortunately, these false claims made by Loeb have nothing to do with the merits of his position or of his arguments.

I sympathize with his protest that men have no rights in such cases, and women have all the rights, though not with his claims that embryos do or should have rights.

Update, 8/7/16.

In several of my posts I find I have mistaken how very early in pregnancy the growing individual is already a recognizably, albeit tiny, unborn human child.

Zygotes are clusters of relatively undifferentiated cells.

Acorns, if you please.

Embryos after a couple of weeks are visibly very tiny baby humans.

Tiny and fragile saplings, then.

And a sapling is a small tree, and not merely a fertilized seed.

As to viability, well, that is only a matter of technology, eh?