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Philosopher Robert Joyce's article "When Does A Person Begin" is included in the anthology edited by Hilgers, Moran, and Mall. He discusses the nature of personhood and the time at which a person begins to exist. Statements in brackets are added. He writes as follows:

A person is essentially a being that is naturally gifted (not self-gifted) with capacities or potentialities to know, love, desire, and relate to self and others in a self-reflective way. The person is --not by self but by nature-- able to be aware of who he or she is and able to direct his or her own self in accord with this nature. . . . There are many alternate ways of phrasing the definition of a person, depending upon different needs of emphasis. But it would seem to be crucial that we recognize a person as a natural being and not simply as a functional being. A person is one that has the natural, but not necessarily the functional, ability to know and love in a trans-sensible or nonmaterial way. As soon as we require a person to have the functional ability for this kind of activity, we seem to slip into a subjectivistic elitism such that the comatose, senile, and retarded --even the sleeping-- would not be regarded necessarily as persons. This possibility is out of touch with the human condition. . . . I would suggest that a person is not an individual with a developed capacity for reasoning, willing, desiring, and relating to others. A person is an individual with a natural capacity for these capacities and relationships, whether this natural capacity is even developed or not --i.e., whether he or she ever attains the functional capacity or not. . . . Neither a human embryo nor a rabbit embryo has the functional capacity to think, will, desire, read, and write. The radical difference, from the very beginning of development, is that the human embryo actually has the natural capacity to act in these ways, whereas the rabbit embryo does not and never will.

[Later, Joyce asks when persons begin to exist.]

If a person is an individual entity with the natural, though not necessarily functioning, capacity to think, will, and relate self-reflectively, when does such an individual actually begin to exist in the world of space and time? There would seem to be but one reasonable point at which to acknowledge the existence of a new individual person in this world: conception. . . . No individual living body can "become" a person unless it already is a person. No living being can become anything other than what it already essentially is. From the perspective of the beginning of a living thing, for such a being to become something essentially other --say, for a "subpersonal human animal" to become a person-- it would have to be a person before it was a person, so that it could be said to become.

Moreover, from the point of view of an adult, if, at this moment, I do not simply have a body, but in some natural sense am my body, then it is likewise perceptive to say and reasonable to conclude that I did not simply acquire a body at some point, but was that whole body naturally at every point of its time as well as its space. Otherwise, I could never properly say such things as "When I was conceived. . ."

Reference: Robert Joyce, "When Does A Person Begin," in New Perspectives on Human Abortion, edited by Thomas W. Hilgers, Dennis J. Horan, and David Mall, p. 346-351. Text in brackets added.