Pro Abort "Professor": A Baby Is Not A Person Until 18 Months

Up until then, he claims, there's nothing wrong with killing a child - unborn or even a newborn. If anything, he believes that killing a pig is worse than killing a baby. No, we're not making this up; that's his own words, spoken in front of an audience of ~150 students and members of the public:

In her remarks, Gray pointed out that the scientific community is unanimous that life begins at fertilization. At fertilization, she explained, the child “has everything she needs within herself to direct her growth and to move to the next more mature stage of her development.”

Mercer agreed that the unborn are human beings, and that abortion is the deliberate killing of a human being, but argued that the notion of “human being” is not a “morally relevant concept.” Individuals are not special by virtue of their “species membership,” he said, but become “persons” and worthy of protection because they possess certain “ethically salient properties” such as the ability to experience pain or pleasure, self-consciousness, and rationality.
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According to Mercer, a child likely only gains personhood at around 18 months to two years of age, and he also suggested at one point that adult pigs might be persons. Though he said he couldn’t imagine a reason to justify killing a born child given the availability of adoption, he said upon further questioning that “if the child isn’t a person, it’s not an offense against the child to kill it.”

A principled vegetarian, he agreed that it could be wrong to kill a pig even though he believes it’s acceptable to kill a child in the womb.

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Even if such views are not (yet) mainstream, they portray the pro-abort crowd quite accurately. After all, the very same arguments that are used to justify abortion, could be used to justify killing of the newborn babies. And, of course, the idea that human life, at certain circumstances isn't worth much, the belief that animals are equally (if not more) worthy of protection, the desire to cling to these views even if they directly contradict known scientific facts - we see that all the time, everywhere - from university campuses all the way to the House of Commons.

P.S. Talking about "possessing certain 'ethically salient properties' such as the ability to experience pain or pleasure, self-consciousness, and rationality" which make one a person - study shows that newborn babies remember music they heard in the womb. So maybe it's "doctor" Mercer who lacks the ability to "express self-consciousness and rationality"?...