Consciousness is not a sufficient criteria. Plenty of organisms have consciousness and yet we grant them no rights or personhood. Regardless, the fuzzy uncertain approx range at which consciousness emerges (and varies for every pregnancy) would not serve as any kind of defensible basis to view it as an ethics free cluster of cells then suddenly a full person with full ethical consideration. It is at best a fuzzy continuum in which it has some level of ethical status the increases over time, but it can never have full personhood rights until post-birth because it is not physically distinct from someone who already has full personhood rights, the mother. The fetus being inside the mother's body is by far the clearest and most objective dividing line between whether it can be given full personhood or not. Only post birth does the mother's actions upon her own body not have direct incidental impact upon the child. When one thing is fully inside of another person's body, it is logically impossible for them to both exercise rights of personhood.
The birth canal is the most intellectually defensible dividing line between full personhood and something less than that. My critique of pro-choicers is when they acknowledge the importance of this dividing line, but go too far in arguing and acting as though there is nothing in between full personhood and being nothing but a cluster of cells with zero ethical consideration, as though a living thing developing toward humaness and personhood but just a few weeks shy is no different than a wart. Even a pre-consious fetus should have more ethical status than a wart.
Your view is hardly intuitive, since when we normally talk about
personhood we are talking about something about the
person, not something about his position relative to the birth canal.
I don't know about "intuitive" but intuition is usually wrong. However, my view is extremely logical and maps strongly onto the standard concept of a person, both psychological and legal notions of personal liberty and rights. When we talk about a "person" we are referring to the physical distinctness that makes them one person rather than another person. An organism completely within the body of another person is not physically distinct, thus it is impossible the think or talk about them as a "person" that is not also another person. My reference to the birth canal is just a way of highlighting whether the organism is inside (non-distinct from) or outside (distinct from) the mother's body.
There may be other considerations that arise when a baby is no longer dependent on its mother's body, but those are changes in the external environment, not in whether he is a person or not. It is no less strange to suggest the birth canal confers personhood than any particular moment that occurs in the womb.
Personhood requires an individual organism and thus cannot logically apply to both the mother and the fetus inside her, which are note physically individuated. Thus, literal physical separation from the mother is neccessary to create two individuals, and only then are there two persons. No developmental changes within the womb create actual physical separation, thus none can be sufficient for personhood to which the concept of individual rights applies.
Note, it isn't about
hypothetical potential independence after some
potential process of removing it that has
not yet occurred. It is about the fetus being
actually no longer inside the mother, and until that moment it is not an individual person, only a potential one.
Rather, personhood is something that is slowly gained after birth, and the newborn is progressively more of a person as it acquires those traits (whatever they may be). This fits our usual understanding, since the acquisition of personhood is simultaneous with changes in the person himself, not in his spatial location. What I am suggesting is that nobody is born a person.
By far the most objective and defining feature of personhood is biological physical individuality. Without it, no amount of development can make them a person. If somehow a fetus developed to the point of a 5 year old inside the womb, it would not be a person and further from being one than a premature newborn.
Nothing can be a person prior to birth. Of course there is important development post birth. However, it is unclear that a newborn completely lacks any neccessary features of personhood. Regardless, personhood directly determines whether an organism has any rights and can be viewed differently than a wart. For many pragmatic reasons it would be a very bad idea to no grant such status to babies once born, not the least of which is no point of development is or will ever be as scientifically and empirically as clear and objective as the the point at which an organism is inside then outside the body of another organism.
