Pro-Choice: Sentience
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L.W. Sumner has argued that "sentience" should be used as a criterion of what he calls "moral standing". At a minimum, sentience includes the capacity to feel pleasure or pain. Once a being is sentient, it has moral standing. During the early period of gestation the embryo lacks sentience. It therefore lacks moral standing and has no rights that can be violated. Toward the end of pregnancy the fetus is sentient. Therefore, it has moral standing and its good or harm must be considered. The middle period is one of transition. Sumner concludes that early abortions are morally permissible but that late abortions require serious justification (e.g., saving the life of the mother).

Sumner argues that using sentience in this way fits many of our moral intuitions and can also be integrated into a broader moral theory (i.e., utilitarianism).

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