John Hood is right that establishing that early-stage human lives are precisely that does not prove that they deserve to be protected. It will always be possible for someone to argue that they do not deserve protection simply because they are human beings. Someone could always argue that only “persons” deserve protection, and that there is a class of human beings who are non-persons. So that argument–more philosophical than scientific–also has to be addressed once the scientific confusions are cleared up.

Let me touch a corner of that argument by saying why I don’t think John Hood’s proposal (which is not only his) works. We don’t treat brain-dead people as dead because they are living human organisms who happen no longer to be persons. We treat them as dead because they are no longer organisms, no longer capable of directing their own internal functioning. The brain performs this task in human beings who have a brain, but the task is obviously also performed by human beings who do not yet have brains.

Hood’s proposal would have more plausibility if our criterion for death were not whole-brain death but cerebral death. Then we would be making higher mental functions our criterion, and we could say that consistency demands that we not treat the early-stage human being as a person. (There are other categories of human beings whom we would also have to exempt.) Under those circumstances, however, I would be inclined to say that our criteria were simply wrong.