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I would think a human that 'can live independent of its mother' would be the critical factor. If not, wouldn't we have to say that some mentally retarded humans are not persons?
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Agreed. And (as ecib points out above) IMHO this gets to the crux of the problem. Every answer to this question can lead to a distasteful place. It's one of those contextual truths.
That's the odd thing about the law. It works with the assumption that consistency and logic can be applied, where sometimes it cannot. Some lines just don't seem to be definable. We can recognize the two separate states, but we just can't seem to define the transition. You can make effective arguments all along this issue. This one is interesting, because it seems to test the logic of the extreme. If anything, I think it works to elucidate just how arbitrary these definitions are.