About the significance of birth as a landmark moment in attaining personhood.

Great Debates
1

I find birth to be a pretty arbitrary watershed moment as there is no significant developmental progress in the minutes/hours it takes for a baby to be born. The baby as it was in utero in essentially the same as it is now wrapped in a blanket.

Yet terminating a pregnancy is ok but killing the baby is not. How does this make sense?

Please, read the whole thing before responding. I am not here to either attack or defend abortion or infanticide. As I normally do here in GD, I am not here to defend a point but to learn what both sides on the matter have to say so I can make my own informed opinion. If I am not seeing your point, try harder, don’t hit harder.

I do not wish to discuss law or religion. I don’t care what the law or some church have to say on the matter. I want to hear facts and considerations on the ethical matter. Things are not right or wrong because they are already enshrined in civil or canon law. This is not about what it is but about what it should be.

Please let’s try to keep away the usual arguments on the matter of abortion. Let’s assume a set of parents that both wanted a baby and conditions on the baby that would not imperil the life of the mother in any sense. The relevant factor being that the condition will mean a harder job of parenting for the parents to the point where they don’t find themselves willing or able to do it.

Also, my internet time during the week is sometimes a lot and sometimes none. If I don’t respond is not because I didn’t like your answer. Don’t expect brilliant answers in either case anyways. Just more questions.

And yes, I am aware that there was a recent thread on abortion and infanticide. I didn’t find my answers there.

Now that we have agreed on the rules of engagement, here are some of my thoughts.

Birth is a great watershed moment in that it is a very definite moment. There is never an argument as to whether a baby is born or not. He is either in or out (except for a few minutes when people is too busy to care).

“Life” begins earlier than birth. Set the line wherever you want, conception, hearbeat, quickening, whatever. At some point before birth, the fetus is a life of his own. And if you somehow pulled him out, he could survive with the aid of some level of care. That line moves further back all the time with the advances of medical care.

After birth, and for a long time, the baby is not much more aware of himself and his surrounding than your average mouse. Yet we have no trouble killing mice.

Now say Down syndrome (just for the sake of the example, substitute if needed with any of the many other conditions for which people choose to terminate pregnancies). Parents who detect it before birth have the option to terminate the pregnancy. Let’s not try to disguise it as the mother’s choice or a matter of her safety. Down kid pregnancies are routinely terminated for no reason other than not bringing a Down kid to life. Why is that option not available for a baby on whom it was not detected before birth? Let’s keep legal baby drops (setting him for adoption) out of the argument since that depends on location.

If a condition is detected at birth that would make that baby too much of a burden to the parents (as decided by the parents), why don’t they have the option to end it there while they did have the option to do it just a few days before? Isn’t that an advantage to parents with access to better screening? I do realize that late term abortions are legal in some locations and not in others. Still, the argument holds for either case. There is always a moment when today you cannot when yesterday you could.

But where do you draw the line? Conception, brain activity, in the delivery room?, first week? month? year? age of reason? legal age?
Anyways, thanks in advance for your thoughtful participation (if applicable).

2

Because a blanket isn’t a living person with a will of her own.

I’m not sure anything is more relevant, so that’s pretty much where my argument stops.

3

Yes, we agree that blankets are not living. Could you now connect that to what I am asking?

4

You’re asking where an arbitrary line should be drawn. I expect you’ll get a variety of answers, none more correct in some absolute moral sense than any other.

5

It IS somewhat arbitrary, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s the nature of trying to legally define a change in states that has no neat objective point that can be used to define the change; an partially arbitrary point needs to be chosen. Birth is simply a convenient one; and we don’t have a good enough understanding of the brain yet to say “this creature has become a person…NOW” even if it is something as sharp as switching on a light which I doubt.

Another example would be adulthood; there’s no neat, objective, physical line that we can pin legal adulthood to; so we end up choosing an age that is by nature somewhat arbitrary. An adult is certainly different than a baby; but they don’t sudden go poof from baby to adult at any one point. So we just have to pick a point ourselves.

6

You are right. I will ask a mod to close the whole forum. Thanks for your participation. Boy am I glad I included that last parenthesis in my OP.

7

Hey, you don’t have to like my participation or my position, but you’ve no call to imply it doesn’t have thought behind it.

8

Yes but birth is not convenient at all. This is the gist of my point. Besides being easy to agree on when it happens, it has nothing going for it. Imagine I give you a shirt but I tell you, you can exchange this but only before you unwrap it. You don’t even know it is a shirt yet (or that it is red).

Before birth we are mostly guessing at what is coming out of there. And the tools for peeking in there create a have/have-not divide. In the first 20 minutes after birth the doctors learn more about that baby than after 9 months of unlimited testing.

True but just as adulthood is vague, so is the degree of the consequences of guessing wrong. Giving alcohol, vote or a gun to someone after or before he is an adult doesn’t make that much of a difference on how they will use it. Individual differences are much bigger in range than what comes from reaching adulthood in one person.

9

If you ever decide to let me know your position, I will see if I like it or not. Saying that opinions vary without having read the OP is not an opinion.

10

Birth simply has lot of emotion attached to it for those involved. People are instinctively and vehemently disgusted by the idea of killing a baby once it’s large enough to cradle in your arms. So much so that people like Brian Ekers come right out and declare that babies are “living person[s] with a will of [their] own” as if it were incontrovertible fact, when that is very thing under discussion.

11

My position was pretty clear in my first post, I thought. I consider the issue to be primarily about the individual rights of the pregnant woman. Trying to draw various lines might be necessary as a matter of political reality (though Canada does without such, with no negative repercussions I’m aware of), but that’s just the requirement of compromise, not morality.

12

I don’t see why you’re so quick to dismiss the issue of late-term abortions. It’s not just ‘some places’ versus ‘other places’. In the US, there are all of 2 doctors who will do third trimester abortions. I don’t know about other countries, so correct me if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure there are similar numbers elsewhere.

So we have a period where many people define the fetus as “not a person” (first & second trimester), a place where everyone defines it as “person” (after birth), and a place where most people are unsure (third trimester). Given the ambiguous nature of it, that seems logical–the changeover happens somewhere in that period, probably, but the only places where we can be sure are at conception and at birth. Which is why debates on abortion tend to be so vicious.

13

I’ve argued about abortion here and in the pit before, but I like Der Trihs’s answer.

Life and the mystery of consciousness is so gradual that there are no obvious lines to draw at all. On the other hand, we’re not Vulcans. We have deeply rooted emotions and ties to not only our offspring, but humans in general (granting you’re not a sociopath).

There are only two states: Living and dead. To choose death for anything we’re calling human usually always brings up strong emotions, and to apply that to a fetus or a baby intensifies it even more, because regardless of whether they can be said to be ‘thinking entities’ or a ‘person’… they’re defenseless, very real, and very alive. It takes a proactive act of termination (killing), to be rid of the whatever perceived or actual burden the baby will be in your life.

I believe there’s some sort of psychological bonding at the point of physical and visual contact (and not just for the parents). So the act of terminating a baby just after labor is why it seems so obviously atrocious. Despite there being no hard line, you’re right in that it’s a watershed moment, not in that the baby becomes separate from its mother, but in that it’s the moment most people feel the baby is real. A ‘crystallization of personhood.’

14

I don’t see anything arbitrary about it. Childbirth is an obvious physical event, one that leads to a pretty dramatic change in the situation of both the mother and the baby. Do you really think it’s a mere fluke or a matter of convenience that society places such great importance on birth, and that it’s of trivial significance to the actual mother and child?

This isn’t to say that convenience doesn’t play any role – even those who believe that life begins at conception are unable to recognize the moment when conception occurs. You can’t feel it happening. It is possible to recognize other things that occur during pregnancy like the first missed period or the first time the fetus can be felt moving around, but choosing one of these as the “big moment” is a lot more arbitrary than going with the moment the baby is actually born.

15

I disagree with this statement. Yes the organic arrangements we call people can be moving around and thinking or in the ground rotting, but it’s nowhere near as binary as life and death. I contend that what you call “life” is a collection of many different simple processes, and the growth or loss of each process to various degrees continues from conception to the final death of every process. At no one point can we magically say something is alive, I think, just that many different processes are going on in this bag of cells.

I agree that birth is a moment of great emotional significance for the parents. And I suspect the reason for that is that those who had a greater emotional connection to their newborn child tended to ensure the survival of their genes better. So maybe it’s not a “mere fluke”, but there still isn’t any universal truth behind it, either.

Does it make any difference if this consensus was reached not out of any factual basis but for emotional reasons?

16

Agreed. It’s a quantifiable event that unambiguously creates (or “results in” if you’ve got an issue with the creation part and how i’m using the word) a “thing” that stands alone from anything else. Which is probably the most important condition for “something” to be considered a member of a society.

17

In the US, is there a state where it’s legal to have an “abortion on demand” up until the point of labor? Is there a doctor that would perform this type of abortion?

Sure, birth is somewhat arbitrary, but you have to draw the line somewhere, and that seems to be as good a point as any. If a doctor has to choose between saving the life of the mother vs that of the almost-born-baby, I would suspect she would save the life of the mother.

Seems to me, and I’ve said this lots of other abortion debates, that we should determine the time of viability, and then back off a bit just to be safe. Abortion after that time should only be permissible if the life or health of the mother is at risk.

18

But that’s what makes it convenient. We can’t nail down the probably nonexistent moment of personhood to use as a decision point; so we use birth instead.

19

I’m not sure that makes any practical difference. Either an organism is viable and will continue to flourish, or it will break down and die. Unless there’s some long lasting and meaningful “between” state of life and death, I think Schrödinger still has an interesting paradox on his hands.

20

Not only is personhood a continuum, as Der Trihs noted, its onset presumably varies across the population.

Birth is a pretty convenient marker though. It’s reasonably straightforward to pinpoint when the tube is cut. And there’s a built-in safety margin, since human babies are born prematurely by mammalian standards due to their large heads.

Another milestone is brainwave activity. Apparently it is not sufficient (though it is necessary) to establish thought processes AFAIK, but once again automatic safety margins are generally speaking a good thing.

Following Gaudere’s thought experiment a few years back, mental activity is tightly connected to the essence of humanity. Consider this gruesome scenario: a head has become detached from its body, with each maintained with artificial life support. I’d argue that a headless corpse isn’t really a person. But a living and thinking head would be an entity worth fighting for.