Again, that’s the issue in question. You set up the scenario so that Alice’s decision did not seem to force behavior on another. But you did so by assuming the status that we are debating.
I certainly don’t think the medical technology in and of itself solves all dilemmas with the abortion question. It is just one potential part of the puzzle.
Claiming that it a person, and thus that killing it is morally significant goes against the rest of established morality and law. A brain dead body isn’t considered a person, and can be disassembled for it’s organs. A tumor is a mindless lump of flesh, and can be removed and destroyed. Everywhere else, it’s mind or the lack thereof that qualifies something as a person or not. The abortion debate is the exception; the anti-abortionists don’t care about mind, because doing so invalidates their position. They want to create a new, twisted definition of “person” that excludes everything worthwhile about personhood. They want to define “person” as “a lump of human meat that isn’t dead”.
If a fetus is a “person”, that just means that you’ve redefined the term so there are classes of “person” which are of no moral value. It doesn’t make the fetus more than it is, but it does degrade the term “person.”
Whoever these anti-abortionists are you are talking about, they are not me. I am talking about the brain. I am talking about the mind. I am talking about a late-term fetus 1 week before gestation, not a 2 day old blastocyst. If you cannot make that distinction, fine, you aren’t having a meaningful conversation with me about the topic I am addressing.
I submit that the topic in law is murkier than you treat it. I submit there is a lot of tension over what exactly the status is for killing a pregnant woman - is that 1 count of murder or 2?
Nonsense. I am not changing the definition of person, I am trying to figure out if that definition applies. I don’t see it in as simple terms as you seem to. My criteria for evaluation has nothing to do with religious sentimentality and everything to do with the status of a living, sensing, thinking human.
**1010011010 ** has already stated that for him, that threshhold does not exist until several months after birth, and so the defining line of personhood isn’t what sets the line that infanticide is wrong, just that birth is a separation point for independent life. I accept his beliefs are sincere. I am trying to explore what those standards of mental development are, and for the purposes of this thread, is the moral status of personhood dependent upon some definable mental status, or some other determination point - say, location outside the womb. If we agree that the determination is mental status, then the issue in question is to determine what level of mental status qualifies - which we may never agree on. But if the determination is some other characteristic, or combination of characteristics, then this discussion may be moot.
Others have said the discussion is moot, because even if a late term fetus had the full mental capacities of an adult, said fetus would be living a parasitic existence on the mother, and therefore, the mother would hold the moral right to terminate that other existence. Again, I understand the position being advocated, and the analogies given to forced organ donation or forced use as life support. I am having trouble accepting those analogies, and am trying to work through for myself all of the moral points.
So for the purposes of discussion, can we think about fetus to mean late-term near gestation fetus and not 1st trimester? Because to me that is the significant discussion, not whether a newly-fertilized egg has a moral value.
Or to put it another way, Please don’t lump me as an “anti-abortionist” and then go on to traipse out all the other “anti-abortionist” motivations and causes and rationales and agendas. Trust me, I don’ t have those. I want to understand this issue.
It’s not significant, since virtually the only reasons such late term abortions are performed is due to fatal birth defects or to save the life/health of the mother. And in those cases the personhood of the fetus is morally irrelevant. And they are extremely rare.
Then why are you trying to shift the discussion to an area of the abortion debate that is primarily a wedge issue for the anti-abortionists ? The freakish, extreme cicumstances that are mainly brought up in an attempt to make an emotional appeal, ban late term abortion, and likely kill women ?
You might as well begin a scenario with “If humans laid eggs and gestated externally would males have a unilateral right to terminate gestation when it was their shift guarding the nest?” You might be able to have an interesting conversation, but the points made there don’t necessarily parallel back to the real circumstances.
Scenario: A pregnant woman is having complications (e.g., complete placenta previa). If we do nothing, she’ll die in child birth. The child can be expected to live a normal life. If we terminate the pregnancy, the fetus dies, but the mother can go on to live a normal life.
Essentially: Mother or Fetus? Choose one. Kill the other.
In most cases where I’ve posed this question, people choose the mother. Some people fight the question and propose conditions that would attack the mother’s claim to life or imply she deserved punishment (e.g., the woman’s on death row, she’s a fornicating slut, etc.), but no one has tried to assert some condition that would raise the fetal claim. So, a fetus with adult-level cognition was a new thing.
I’d still choose the mother. I have a feeling we agree, all else being equal, women’s right supersede fetal rights. By some amount we agree an adult female is “more human” than her fetus.