That which distinguishes man from the animal kingdom is the imago Dei, the image of God. The image of God has traditionally been identified with such things as rationality, self-consciousness, the exercise of dominion, and moral conscience. However, we must be careful in defining the image of God in wholly functional terms. The image of God is as much a state as it is a capacity. The image is not to be conceived as an end in a process whereby an unborn entity progresses into personhood. The image is a given, not a goal to which the fetus moves in its physiological development. No one denies that the fetus develops. But this development is not from non-person to part-person to full-person, but rather from full-person to the consummate expression and experience of all that personhood entails.