Mark Mercer is a professor in the philosophy department at Saint Mary’s University and yesterday he wrote an op-ed for the Ottawa Citizen that will make your head spin. The column is beyond excerption, but briefly his argument is this: the unborn child is a human being but it isn’t a person because it is not aware of itself in the world and therefore doesn’t have any rights and his or her mother can have an abortion and kill the human being (but not person) if she chooses. The problem with this argument is that unless you already accept the assertion that there is a significant difference between being a human being (a biological fact) and a person (a legal and philosophical concept), Mercer isn’t very convincing. That doesn’t prevent the good professor from declaring an end to the abortion controversy, at home and abroad, because, presumably, everyone will just accept his distinction that human beings can be killed at will while human persons deserve some legal protection after birth.
