Babies are people

 Babies are born already conscious, sentient, thinking, feeling human beings. They're already full people, not potential future people. Babies are ignorant -- they're new to the world, and have yet to learn the things adults have come to take for granted. Babies are also dependent -- they need someone to feed them, carry them, and clean up their waste.

But people who don't know things are still people. People who need help with things are still people.

I regularly see infants described as "non-sentient." Sometimes this is done by people like Peter Singer, arguing that babies shouldn't have human rights. Other times, it's done by well-intentioned people trying to argue against the abuse or behavior modification (a form of abuse) of babies, e.g. "Your baby isn't 'behaving badly,' she's barely conscious!" I respect the well-meaning intent of the latter, as a more humane alternative to the framing of infant behavior like crying as "bad" or "manipulative," but this doesn't have to mean framing babies as unthinking blobs. Human babies are capable of incredible learning, including word structures that adult linguists are still working to understand. Babies under a year old can learn complex syllable patterns well before they learn basic survival skills like "sharp things are dangerous."

In my last post (https://hyperlexichypatia.blogspot.com/2021/10/why-long-adolescence-is-disability-issue.html) I said that ageism against young adults is a disability issue. So is ageism against babies. A common ableist claim is that disabled adults are "like babies." This isn't true -- disabled people are the age that we are, and disabled adults who need similar levels of support as young children are still adults who deserve adult decision-making rights, which babies obviously lack the knowledge base to exercise. But even if disabled adults actually were "like babies," it wouldn't be okay to dehumanize us, because it's not okay to dehumanize babies either.