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Obviously improvements in technology is a problem for a deadline like that. We'd have to keep moving it and eventually choose a different way of determining a deadline. That said I do think it should be an option to some degree.
In this particular case I think the surrogate is being disingenuous about her religion but a contract shouldn't sign away the rights of your body. However, I really do dislike it when people manage to sue for child support from a donor. That's just wrong.

 Peregrine wrote:
Consider an analogy:

Whether "killing" is right or wrong is a complex subject. For example, there is legitimate disagreement over how and when it is ok to kill in self defense, whether or not you can have a "just" war, etc. However, none of that disagreement prevents us from saying that torturing and murdering people just to watch them suffer is wrong. We don't say "wait, you can't say that, you haven't defined 'murder' properly yet" because that uncertainty isn't relevant.

Saying that there are grey areas without saying why they are and how they are is a copout to making the effort to find a precise definition. There could very well be one, and you've simply decided that it fitted your point not to go the step further in your inquiry. Murder is or isn't necessarily well defined, if you want to debate on it, you have to evaluate it, because it is extremely important. In every discourse you are correct to question the use of terms which you disagree with, and the one about abortion seems appropriately critical. It's what philosophy is all about, and it's what law is a lot about too. Look at all the posts you have used to term 'reasonnably' in. Each time you use that word, you beg the question.

I actually believe that chimps do qualify for some kind of "personhood", but that's an irrelevant gray area.

That is important, because it's mostly a fringe opinion which at the same time justifies a treatment to another specie's being that you would not authorise on one of your own at a certain stage of it's development. I find that kind of selective empathy strange.

And yes, brain function is required. If you remove a brain from someone's body and destroy it, then place the body on life support machines so the rest of it remains alive I don't think you're going to say that they still qualify as a person.

I would think that it would be a person who has been deprived of it's brain. If you could give it back, or could hope that it re-developps, then I would not see this as less then a person. A fetus of 1-5 weeks has 'brain-to-come', just like a human being from 5-weeks to mid-20s has a 'brain-in-progess', just like a person from on then has a 'brain-degrading'. I still don't know why I should treat them differently.

A functioning brain. IOW, achieving a level above that of a cockroach. Brain tissue might technically exist at five weeks, but it certainly isn't doing any thinking.

I don't know what you have against cockroaches, if it happens they are pretty bright. If it's consciousness that you are valuing so much, newborns don't have that for a long while. You have the thalamo-cortical structure in place from 24 weeks, but it doesn't work. A fetus is in REM sleep all during the pregnacy. It's the rush of birth that kicks it in, and it developps its function gradually. What we generally qualifies as consciousness, on top of things, also requires autobiographical self, which is dependant on a much longer exposition to language, probably about a year. Before that, your a complex reflex machine.

qualify as a "person" by any reasonable standard.

There you go again