Hey, Hey, Were the Monkeys

In Spain, the ruling Socialist party has proposed legislation in parliament that would grant personhood status to primates and give them the same moral and legal protections currently reserved only for humans. 

Their rationale is that the genetic code for a human is 98.4 percent the same as a chimpanzee, 97.7 percent the same as a gorilla and 96.4 percent the same as an orangutan.  Interestingly, elective abortion is legal in Spain which means that the unborn are not seen as persons despite the fact that their genetic code is 100 percent the same as a human.  In fact ... they are human! 

That aside, we assume that if this legislation is enacted it will expand the “right to choose” to include the country’s politically influential monkey population.  After all, it doesn’t seem fair to discriminate against our knuckle-dragging cousins simply because their ancestors chose to remain monkeys while ours decided to swing down out of the trees, stand upright, and morph into human beings.