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In her paper "On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion" Mary Ann Warren argues for a high standard of personhood. Warren's article originally appeared in The Monist in January of 1973. All or part of the article can be found in the Baird and Feinberg anthologies. She rejects any biological definition of personhood. Here is an excerpt:

What characteristics entitle an entity to be considered a person? . . .

Imagine a space traveler who lands on an unknown planet and encounters a race of beings utterly unlike any he has ever seen or heard of. If he wants to be sure of behaving morally toward these beings, he has to somehow decide whether they are people, and hence have full moral rights, or whether they are the sort of thing which he need not feel guilty about treating as, for example, a source of food.

How should he go about making this decision?. . .

I suggest that the traits which are most central to the concept of personhood, or humanity the moral sense, are, very roughly, the following:

(1) consciousness (of objects and events external and/or internal to the being), and in particular the capacity to feel pain;

(2) reasoning. . . ;

(3) self-motivated activity. . . ;

(4) the capacity to communicate, by whatever means, messages of an indefinite variety of types. . . ;

(5) the presence of self-concepts, and self-awareness, either individual or racial, or both. . . .

All we need to claim, to demonstrate that a fetus is not a person is that any being which satisfies none of (1)-(5) is certainly not a person. I consider this claim to be so obvious that I think anyone who denied it, and claimed that a being which satisfied none of (1)-(5) was a person all the same, would thereby demonstrate that he had no notion at all of what a person is --perhaps because he had confused the concept of a person with that of genetic humanity.