Leah Libresco Sargeant, in a post called “Defining Human to Leave Out Almost Everyone”:

Wrinkles are what a person looks like if they’re lucky enough to grow old. Physical weakness is part of who we are at the beginning and end of our lives, and, especially for the chronically ill, for large parts of the middle. And, as Richard John Neuhaus points out in Death on a Friday Afternoon, we can’t strike the normal progression of life out of our definition of humanity.

It has always struck me as puzzling that some people say that an embryo or a very small fetus does not look like a human being. That is exactly what a human being looks like when it is two weeks or two months old. It is what you looked like and what I looked like.

The restitution narrative treats suffering and dependence as an unnatural state—a privation of something that we rightfully have. But (to paraphrase Hamlet) the thousand natural shocks are what flesh is heir to. The lively health we experience for a time as teenagers and in our early twenties is not the way our bodies will work for the rest of our lives. It is not what we had at the beginnings of our lives. We do better with a supportive culture for all persons and capacities, rather than an expectation we’ll sustain that sort of strength forever.