The problem is, Legal rights is not based upon essentialism or Catholic morality.
The legal system is incapable of defining a fetus as human in the personal sense of the word, regardless of whether it is essentially a human being or not.
The legal understanding—referred to in Roe v. Wade by Justice Blackmun–is that in terms of US law, a human being is a person (and a person is a human being. They are mutually defining terms. This view goes back centuries and is ASSUMED in the Roe decision.)
Since Roe, with advances in technology, there is NO debate about whether a fetus is human being, period. That is over. The argument now is that “human being” does not entail “personhood” and without personhood—a status determined by others–one lacks rights. But THAT is not legal reasoning. It is moving-the-goalposts-because-we-can’t-pretend-a-fetus-isn’t-a-human-being reasoning.
It is FALSE to claim that the law cannot see a fetus as a person. A fetus is a human being and a human being is a person. It is true to say that people who favor abortion cannot accept the possibility that they may be wrong and THEREFORE, the fetus is a human being “in a biological sense, sure” but not in an “ethcially compelling sense” (-by which they mean “it doesn’t compel US and we don’t care if it compels other people”).
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