These are good talking points but the answers are pretty instinctive. Everyone or anyone decides value. A human interaction creates value, and once an animal gains their humanity from interaction with other humans, they're a human. That is the difference between an unwanted foetus vs an unwanted child: whoever helps deliver the birth and holds that baby in its arms gives that baby value. It's a memory that they will have of it living and breathing, and an achievement that they have delivered it. That gives the child value.I am obviously not as intelligent as many of the great posters of this forum so my thoughts are pretty irrelevant but I do wonder what the difference in “extrinsic value” is between an unwanted fetus vs an unwanted child. Not quite sure attributing value to people is a slam dunk argument (Who decides “value”? What gives someone “value”?) but what do I know...
Before people say "well pro-lifers care about foetuses therefore they have extrinsic value", it has to be two-way street. Not only does the baby give a sense of joy to the person who delivers it and, hopefully, its mother, but the baby gives the person who delivers it greater value by virtue of its gratitude towards them delivering them. If something is unable of giving value back to another human, then it is not human.
I admit that in theory a biological child could fail to be human if everyone who interacts with it also doesn't care about it, for instance if it is known ahead of time that if the baby were to be a girl it would be killed immediately, and upon its birth it is a girl, and no one tries to stop the death after its birth. This was practised in China for millennia and only Buddhists tried to stop it (Christians just kinda wrote about and painted it), and it was rarely something that the state cared to prosecute on. This is because "some Chinese did not consider newborn children fully "human", and saw "life" beginning at some point after the sixth month after birth" (source). If everyone that the child met didn't consider it to be human until it was 6 months old, then it had no extrinsic value until after 6 months and could be killed.
While this practice may sound horrendous to our ears, it's only horrendous if we assume absolute morality exists, which again necessitates spirituality / religious metaphysical tangents which everyone just has their own incompatible views on and ends up disagreeing with. To the Chinese people committing these things, they were just killing animals, and it's western-centric to lambaste them for that.
As it stands, though, in our society once a baby is delivered it almost certainly means something to someone. This means it has value.