The personhood of the human embryo.

My interlocutor is anyone who denies personhood to the embryo on the grounds that a human person can exist only in conscious activity and that in the absence of consciousness a person cannot exist at all. I probe personal consciousness to the point at which the distinction between the being and the consciousness of the human person appears, and argue on the basis of this distinction that the being of a person can exist in the absence of any consciousness. I proceed to argue that it is not only entirely possible for the embryo to be a human person, but that, given the embodied personhood of us human beings, this is the only reasonable assumption which we can make.