[pluma]

The abortion debate is largely orthogonal to the personhood of a foetus.

There is no precedent for making it illegal to refuse to risk your health, well-being and bodily integrity to sustain another person with your own body. If the risk is negligible, sure, everything else would be denial of assistance -- but pregnancy (to say nothing of birth) is extremely risky as far as biological processes go.

You could argue about a voluntary pregnancy being some kind of contract that suspends your right to bodily integrity but that still wouldn't apply to unwanted pregnancies, which represent the majority of abortions.

Arguing that a foetus' personal rights are violated by early stage termination of a pregnancy is just special pleading biased by religious ideas about the inherent sanctity of life. Most nefariously, the same people who argue for the rights of a foetus also oppose the welfare that would be necessary to address the social impacts of the unwanted birth. Or to put it more hyperbolically: "A human's life is holy, until they are born".

[xCathedra]

I'm only arguing that the term personhood has extensive use in definining rights for humans and non-humans, providing a prominent ethicist as an example. I'm not trying to open up an abortion debate in a comment thread, because those simply go no where, influence no one, and fail to advance a meaningful dialogue.

You can certainly disagree with applying personhood to the abortion debate and claim an unlimited number of nefaroious motives behind pro-life advocates, but those would be different discussions. The term personhood is used widely for embyronic and non-human rights, that's the extent of my claim.