There is no such thing as a self-supporting organism. What organisms did you consume for lunch today?
Of course… Well, there is no of course not in history. That being said, no, they are not directly connected, except in that the naming practices tended not to be done at birth due to the chances for the baby not to survive. The exposure-on-a-hill, when found, historically, has verged from ‘accepted practice as they are not human beings yet’ to murder.
Thanks for the link to Sagan’s article. A very interesting read.
In response to no one in particular but after having read all the response so far. I realize that this is hard. That’s what makes it worth discussing. I realize that the line is not clear, that’s why there is need for the discussion.
Also, although I see that many of my points make me look like I am erring on the side of infanticide, I believe that all the issues are the same if we draw the line at some point before birth. The issue remains that personhood is at some point gained and the line is not clear.
Date of conception (to determine a certain time of development) is either self-reported or an estimate. The quickening is self-reported. I can live with those. What will come out of this discussion won’t be signed into law the next day. If we end up agreeing that a baby becomes a person when he starts pondering about the differences between the left and the right boob, I can manage that we cannot measure that with much certainty.
My main concern now is that I think that a life that doesn’t suffer (or cheer or anything as long as there is some awareness and a response to it) at the thought of its end is not a life that needs to be protected. This is a similar case to a patient in a permanent vegetative state. I realize that handling those is far from being something we all agree on, but at least we can all agree that there is something to be debated there.
Fair enough. I apologize if my wording was not clear, but I definitely mean changes relevant to attaining personhood. Things that differentiate us from fish and butterflies.
And I agree with this. I feel that after the “viability” point (whatever that is, but it’s probably around the 5th-6th month of gestation), abortions should be based far more on medical concepts, such as endangerment of the mother’s life or as mentioned earlier, issues with the fetus (Down’s, etc.). But since that point is so nebulous, it just is common sense to use birth as the defining moment of the beginning of life.
If I could put the point of my statement in one endzone of a football field, and you at the other end, you’d have to run out of the stadium, across the parking lot, and into the next city to properly represent how much you missed it by.
Birth is the moment that the person emerges from the underworld (depths of the earth), to the surface (Ps 139:13,15), which has nothing to do with the start of personhood, [IMHO] as that was always a person, a aspect of the parents spirit which is given it’s own identity and life, but always part of and connected to the parent, even into death, even death by abortion[/IMHO]
:roll:
Not wanting to invest in a baby because of the high probability it will die and killing it are two different things. Of course killing a baby is not murder when it is sanctioned by society - it isn’t by definition, no more than killing a convicted murderer is.
Which brings me to a point I haven’t seen discussed yet - what was the miscarriage rate in ancient times? If it was high, I have a hard time believing a fetus was considered to be a person, any more than a newborn baby was, and abortion could hardly be murder. I can see someone not the father causing a woman to lose a baby being considered a crime, on a property basis, but not anything close to murder.
mswas, after observing the screwing around you’ve been doing trying to obfuscate the definition of “person” beyond the point of unusability, I decided to look it up, checking my usual first choice Merriam-Webster’s. The first definition given is “human, individual”. This definition knifes the little game you’re playing in the back: by this, Hawkins is a person, a birthed baby is a person, and a fetus is not, as it is not a separate and distinct entity from its mother. Assuming we were going to debate the ethics of this based on personhood, it also clearly marks birth as the demarcation point, as that’s the point of separation.
Now, personally, I would be willing to give some ground and set the elective abortion cutoff point at the start of the third trimester, since my vague sense of the issue that that that’s around the point where we may start to be dealing with a reasonably complex excuse for a mind, which might be worth preserving whether or not it qualifies as a person yet. (Keeping in mind that some people never develop a mind, yaddah yaddah - they eventually get born instead, which is also sufficient.)
So yeah, I don’t mind discussing the issue reasonably - but if we’re going to be playing stupid games with the word “person”, then I’ll stick with the defintion and not bother to compromise from the ‘at birth’ position that it explicitly implies.
Are you talking about birth or my example using the first word?
As much as I would like to agree with you, and I’m pro-choice, I think the human tendency to mark moments by events is a poor arbitrary line. It’s like people deciding the year 2000 was special just because it has a lot of zeros.
A few things change at birth, this is true. But a few things change earlier in the womb as well. The fact that we find it hard to decide when some of the other things occur is limited by technology. I fear that if we were to simply say it’s hard to figure out when a zygote implants, for example, and when we have the technology to find out, abortion foes will come back and try to push the line in the sand back even further.
That’s why I say it’s completely arbitrary from the time the penis enters the vagina to birth. So we pick birth and give the mom the most time to change her mind. I’m fine with that. If you limit yourself to something else entirely arbitrary like survivability, then you run the risk of technological advancements encroaching on the right of abortion.
Incredibly high. From activity to starvation to excessive lead in one’s diet, miscarriage was very high in ancient to near modern times.
You so obviously didn’t understand my argument that there really isn’t anything for me to say to this. My entire point was that anyone who is human is a person.
I am talking about birth. It’s the least arbitrary of all criteria.
Ah, that is good. 
It seems like there have been a lot of birth threads lately, and most of the others seem to reflect their OPs’ personal situations.
Actually, I said “appearification” specifically to make the point that I was not referring to birth. How viable a fetus would be outside the womb, while related to when the baby is born, are not the same thing. And birth involves significantly more than moving the baby outside the mother. Or is that all it is? Maybe I’m in the wrong here.
I think there was a movie once where the main character transported his brain back int time to his own fetus and strangled himself with his umbilical cord to prevent a horrible future.
But time traveling aside, I’m not sure just how different the reaction of crippled animals are to humans that face down death. They say that mice, when cornered, will simply drop dead of fear. Does that make them more human than rats? Does that sentence mean anything? I’m pretty sure that babies, even straight out of the womb, have some understanding of death. Actually, as a teenage boy, I know very little about babies. But from what I know, I’m pretty sure they do.
I disagree with you. I think that a baby feels suffering toward life-threatening dangers straight from birth, and even for a period of time in the womb. Enough to be a person.
No; babies have a very limited understanding of, well, anything. They don’t appear to even understand that objects persist when hidden from sight, or that other creatures have feelings and awareness. You can’t understand death until you understand that others are alive and independent of your awareness, first.
This muddies the waters. But it’s also worth posting, in my view. Personhood is a continuum and can be extended past adulthood, if one works within a framework of personal growth. Some spend precious little time in the upper reaches of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; few attain buddhahood.
Sapo might usefully define personhood in a tighter manner, but I think it’s clear that he’s concerned with more fundamental aspects of humanity, the least sophisticated ones that nonetheless distinguish us from nonprimate animals. But while we are dealing with a continuum, I think there are some bright lines that occur along the way: among them are conception, the onset of brainwave activity, birth, walking, [del]literacy[/del], [del]playing an instrument[/del], [del]calculus[/del], etc.
I don’t believe that’s a reasonable interpretation of the particular quotes you’re using there. After all, Ps 139 15 continues into 16 thus;
While 13 explicitly mentions the womb, if this is a reference to a time before birth, then that the text says that the days “ordained for me” have not yet happened yet indicates to me that life, or the “I”, has not yet begun. If anything i’d say you could make a very good case based on this that birth (if this is what it is referring to) is considered by this particular part of the text to be the beginning of a person. IOW, the “person” does not emerge at that time, but is created, as the days ordained for it begin. It seems pretty clear to me.
Just for the record, the OP’s premise that there is a legal distinction about the status of an infant in the moments before and after birth is a false one. Elective abortion is illegal in the 3rd trimester. The correct comparison is between a born baby and a 2nd trimester fetus.
The designation of birth as the threshold to “personhood” is an arbitrary one, yes, but so is the designation of the 18th birthday as the threshhold to “adulthood.” Does a person undergo any transformation at the stroke of midnight on his/her birthday? You have to draw a line somewhere. Just as there is surely a difference between a child and an adult, even if there is no discrete moment of transformation, so there is also a difference between an embryo, or a fetus and a “person.”
Please, please, please, pretty please. Don’t. Not here. I specifically asked to keep religion out of this.
Well offering my personal opinion on it, I think personhood is conferred by sentience. Thus, a thinking machine like a Cylon is a person in the way a brain-dead comatose human body is not.