Which Relationality? Whose Personhood? The Christian Understanding of the Person, ‘After-Birth Abortion’ and Embryonic Stem Cell Research

Abstract

This article argues that the concept of personhood is intrinsically relational and that a relational understanding of created personhood can be derived from divine personhood and understood systematically in relation to itself, the pre-personal world and to other persons. Insofar as this set of three relationships is understood to be dislocated by sinful self-enclosedness in the penultimate reality and standing in contradiction to the ultimate reality retrospectively constituting it, the article suggests that all created personhood at present could be called ‘potential’ personhood. The article then examines the concept of personhood maintained by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva in their recent paper on ‘after-birth abortion’ in comparison to Johannes Fischer’s discussion of embryonic stem cell research and personhood. In response to both, the article concludes that it is not possible at present for humans to make a concrete external identification of the divine relation that internally constitutes created personhood. As a result, the article proposes adopting a veil of ignorance with reference to the status of embryonic personhood, as it would be worse to deny the status of personhood to an actual person than to attribute personhood to a non-person.