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The political implications aside, for a moment, the philosophical question is an interesting one. There are two paths to head down in trying to define personhood.
The first is to try to establish a certain kind of essential nature that defines a person. That conversation centers around ideas like "mind" or "soul", or particular non-material qualities that are essential to personhood. The objection to this path is that it requires something more than brute materialism. It defines human beings by something other than the mere connection of certain molecules together in a particular pattern. Plato was fine with that, modern post-religious ethics, not so much.
The second path is to define "person" by a certain set of capacities. Things like capacity to reason, or to make tools, or to use language. Those definitions have gone through rocky times recently, as we discover more and more non-human animals that demonstrate those same capacities, albeit in limited measure. The other problem with capacity definitions is that they present huge difficulties for people who once had, but no longer have, those capacities. If personhood is a set of capacities, then at what point does someone with a degenerative mental disease, who slowly loses all of those capacities, also lose their status as a person?
There is, I suppose, a "pure science" way of defining persons. That would involve identifying the exact DNA differential that makes up a member of Homo Sapiens, and making that the exact definition of "person". There's a disconnect with that, though. We talk about "person" differently than we talk about Homo Sapien. A "person" is a moral entity, with rights and obligations. A Homo Sapien is a certain kind of animal. There's no good reason to presume that the rights and ethical obligations we assign to "persons" should attach simply by virtue of protein math.
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