This is my POV, somewhat, but I don’t agree with your conclusion. The fetus is a parasite and until it is viable the mother should be able to choose to eject it from her body. Once it is viable and no longer needs to be attached to the mother to survive, I’m against termination. Viability is difficult to define - 23 weekers have survived on rare occasions, and in my mind there’s a question mark over whether a very prem baby can be called viable if it’s early birth is likely to result in moderate to severe health problems and disabilities. That’s something that would need to be hashed out after a lot more research than I’m prepared to do this morning.
A parasite is something that will die without being attached to a host. A newborn is not attached to a host and can be passed from one carer to another without difficulty. Therefore, I do not believe that even a helpless newborn can be called a parasite, they are simply a dependant.
You have the capability of learning if you really have to. I love steak, but I don’t know how to kill a cow. If I’m stranded on an island only with cows, I’ll try my best to figure it out. If I’m 3, I’ll cry till I’m dead.
Though, I disagree that survival status is a valid way of defining personhood, largely because my survival status is dependent on the environment just as much as a zygote’s. If you tear me away from my Walmarts and my bank accounts and my refridgerator and my water faucets, I’ll be aborted within a week.
Since I’m a little leery of any definition of personhood which excludes myself, I’ll stick with the one based on brain activity. I’m fairly sure I have brain activity…
Oh, I’m soooo domesticated too that I doubt I’d survive alone even on a ready to harvest farm. The brain activity you mention is the key. A toddler might know how to pick a strawberry without being told, but he/she probably won’t know when it’s ripe, how to wash it, how to harvest a lot at once, etc.
Heck man, I wouldn’t know when it was ripe. (I’m a nightmare in a kitchen, seriously.) At this point you are talking about deficiencies in knowledge, experience, and/or education, and if that’s where we’re going then I’m going to start slowly edging out of the room again, before somebody blindsides me with a question about european history or something and decides I’m subhuman based on the results.
For some, that’s surely true. Then you have people likeDr. Bernard Nathanson, who left NARAL to join the pro-life side. He did so while still an atheist, so presumably, the notion of a soul had no bearing on his decision.
If you mean that it cannot be detected by science, that’s true… but only because science is the wrong instrument to use. The soul, if it exists, is non-material; hence, its existence is a metaphysical question rather than a scientific one. Beauty, ethics, and morality cannot be detected by science either, yet few of us would dismiss these notions are being nonsensical.
I’d still need someone to teach me, making me dependent on the teacher.
Sure, if I were stranded on an island populated with the docile and domesticated end result of ten thousand years of animal husbandry, I’d probably be able to get by, too. But I’m still relying on the work of ten thousand years worth of cattle farmers to get by. If I have to hunt down a wild aurochs for dinner, my survivability is significantly impaired.
Of course, the issue of disease and injury puts an entirely different spin on your definition of personhood. About two years back, I had to have surgery to correct a life threatening condition. It’s not something I could have done myself, even if I had medical training. Did I lose my status as a person for the duration of my medical treatment?
Hmmm… still a societal way of classification. I’m stuck thinking on the survivability stuff. If they were alone after a disaster or stranded, no they wouldn’t survive. They would need a society to care for them. Since we HAVE a society, yes they’re people. I don’t believe that people need a function to define themselves as people. Hell, I’m still unemployed and I consider myself a person. (!)
Too bad Eunice Kennedy Shriver passed. I’d like to know what she would think on this.
But beauty, ethics, and morality CAN be contributed to series of electrical pulses in the brain. The soul, on the other hand, is a completely made-up concept that just encompasses anyone who’s living. It’s what people thought was inside a human before science told us that various parts of the brain are behind different thoughts.
Beauty can be analyzed by science–it is something that influences real human behavior and its causes and antecedents are well within the province of science. Ethics and morality are both components of human evolution and the development of human society, and have been objects of legitimate scientific interest for some time. Something akin to moral and ethical systems have been identified in other primate groups, for example.
The soul is something mystical with nothing observable in the real world that can account for it. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, but allowing for mystical objects to influence law-making leads down a path to insanity. Anyone can invent a mystical object; then all one must do is get enough people to believe it. It remains something that someone made up with no basis in reality, nonetheless.
I have the same position, myself. Go ahead and call a fetus a person if you want, I don’t care. It’s a person that is inside the body of another person and the “host” may or may not want it to stay there. If trespassing laws codify that a property owner has to right to remove intruders from his land, I find it hard to imagine a similar (if not far greater) right to self-determination doesn’t apply to one’s own body.
Not to mention the fact that a great many conceptions end in miscarriage, typically without the woman knowing it. From 30%-70%; estimates vary wildly because of the fact that so often no one knows it was there at all. But the estimates have been going up as medical science’s ability to detect pregnancy improves.
That does it. You’ve stepped on my joke once too often. Please turn in your anti-rapture helmet and Irony Meter when the black helicopter pays you its next visit. You are hereby drummed out of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy, which of course does not exist.
