Lithwick's confusion about "humanity", corporations, and babies

The HHS cases being brought by for-profit businesses do not present the Court with philosophical or ontological questions, but rather statutory ones.  Still, for many observers and activists, the temptation to re-work these questions as partisan/political ones is hard to resist, and Dahlia Lithwick's latest Slate essay is a perfect example.

Lithwick likes abortion rights, and doesn't like Citizens United, and so in the essay she works to connect Hobby Lobby's RFRA arguments with the reasoning in Citizens United and efforts in some states to provide greater legal protection to unborn children.  She ends with this:

We can protect animals and unborn babies and corporations without also embodying them with a humanity they don’t possess. Turning everything and anything into a “person” ultimately also serves to turn persons into things.

The first sentence asserts that "unborn babies" do not "possess" "humanity," which is a strange assertion.  There is no serious question about the "humanity" of unborn children; the debate is about the implications of their vulnerability, dependence, and developmental progress on their moral status.  It also assumes that Citizens United or the Hobby Lobby RFRA challenge involve claims that "corporations" "possess" "humanity", which is not the claim.  To say that X is a "person" for legal purposes is not to say that X is a human being.  The second sentence, though, makes a point that has always made me very reluctant to embrace even the Christian cases for animal rights.