Anyway, I also think Dick is brilliant (who doesn’t?). I hadn’t heard of this story, however. Thanks for the reference.

The plot sounds to me like an attack on the distinction between “fetus” and “moral person”. Presumably the point of that story is that mental capacity should not be grounds for discrimination, either between children and adults or, by implication, between adults and fetuses. (Of course, others would reply that sentience and self-awareness are morally-relevant qualities while ability to do algebra is not.) In that way, it would seem to be much along the lines of the film above.

He was a brilliantly weird writer to whom we owe a lot of science fiction, but he was also quite devout. In the year that The Pre-persons was published, he had a vision explaining that he was a persecuted Christian in the latter days of the Roman Empire.

In short, the story posits a future where people who haven’t yet learned to do algebra are fair game for “postpartum” abortion, despite the fact that they’re perfectly formed grade-school children capable of thought and of suffering, as any idiot could point out. The plot concerns a former math professor who claims to not know any algebra in order to martyr himself, being disgusted at the world he lives in. The creepy abortionists are aghast at this idea, pointing out that he’s a person, don’t you know. How nobody ever noticed that this was true of the kids they were hauling off to be gassed is left as an exercise to the reader, but it’s essentially an early instantiation of the line-blurring between “fetus” and “human being” that you cite here.