What relevance, if any, do appeals to sentiment have for issues in practical ethics? The abrupt way with the question is to respond "none; sentiment is one thing and argument is another, and nothing fogs the mind so thoroughly as emotion." Yet in discussions of every basic question in practical ethics appeals to sentiment are commonly made, sometimes to be sure by demagogues, but also by respectable scholars who presumably know what they are doing and proceed unashamedly. Probably no "argument" against abortion, for example, has been so effective as photographs of the tender little faces and chubby paws of "sleeping" ten week fetuses. "Can you deny" ask the anti-abortion partisans, "that this cute little thing with its human face and hands is a person with a person's right to life?" Well, of course one can deny its right to life because having recognizably human features and the capacity to evoke tender responses from observers are not plausible criteria of personhood, but it may be harder to reject in toto the relevance of the feelings induced in nearly everyone by the pictures, especially if we concede that they are natural feelings, "honest and true." Roger Wertheimer, you may recall, bid us imagine a universal mutation that renders the membranous shields of pregnant women transparent so that the developing fetus can be in full public view.l He is unsure of the relevance of this Gedankenexperiment, but he suspects that if the facts were as supposed fewer of us would be liberals about abortion. I for one remain convinced that fetuses are not persons in the sense pertinent to the possession of rights, but Wertheimer's imaginative surmise raises another possibility for me. There may be morally relevant properties of fetuses other than rights and personhood that have a bearing on how we ought to treat them. In virtue of their recognizably human features, ten week old fetuses are natural symbols, themselves only prepersons yet as such sacred emblems of the real thing. As symbols they