Why isn’t a fetus a person?
Scientific, fact-based answer, please.
Of course, if a fetus isn’t a person, there is no abortion debate. I don’t much care much for blobs of flesh.
We’re not talking about the number of legal rapes going up. Apparently you didn’t think it was that hard to understand because you didn’t understand it.
Define “person” scientifically, please. No doubt a human fetus is a member of Homo sapiens sapiens, but that’s NOT the question.
The idea of “personhood” is a legal one, not a scientific one. Hence, when a developing embryo/fetus/whatever crosses the threshold into personhood is a legal one, albeit one that can be informed by scientific fact.
Different posters will offer their own preferred definition of personhood, but these all rely on arbitrary (though important) milestones (brain develops to the point it feels pain, 3rd trimeester, at conception, at birth, etc). It’s important to realize that these are all essentially legal and ethical definitions for whether it is a person, NOT whether it is an example of Homo sapiens.
A fetus, scientifically, is human (i.e. a member of that species). But whether or not it is a human being (i.e. a “person”) is entirely up to local society to determine.
Note that this is NOT a modern interpretation, either. Even after birth, other cultures have had the practice of abandoning or killing fetuses/children before/after birth because their “personhood” was denied. Reasons can and did include things like gender, availability of resources, incest/inbreeding (note incest is actually a legal term and may include acts that will not necessarily result in inbreeding), physical or mental deformity, etc.
If it logically follows from “making abortions legal drives them down” that “making abortions illegal drives them up” which you appear to accept, then the claim in the OP implies both.
If A implies B, stating that A is true also states that B is true.
As far as I can tell, you just repeated what I claimed you said. The person coming up with the hypothetical is in that category, by the way. Now, it is not clear to me that someone who is raped is going to feel better about it if it is illegal versus being legal. I doubt that victims of marital rape are happier now that this is illegal. However that portion of the population who won’t get raped under this scenario is going to feel a lot happier. Is the additional happiness of those people not worth the benefit of making it illegal in your book? You see, as above, under this scenario ,making rape illegal increases the incidence of rape. Are you really saying that you are ok with this?
A teeny quibble to a post that is better than what I was going to right. Personhood is primarily a philosophical concept. If morons in Mississippi had defined a fetus as a person it would be so legally, but not philosophically - any more than the legality of slavery fundamentally altered the personhood of slaves.
Legal questions get resolved by legislatures and courts. Philosophical ones sometimes do by consensus, but until then, we as a society should act to allow women to act on their own opinions about this question, not those of old white men.
Fair enough, though some of us disagree and consider a stance such as yours as more destructive than helpful, reinforcing poverty and such.
I’d offer a small modifier to your statement, which adds a specific on-point detail and ask if you have the same feelings:
This is a fair description of the circumstances, is it not? If you disagree, I invite you to point out why.
Even if disagree with the idea of personhood being a philosophical/sociological concept, it serves a lot to clarify and simplify the issue, especially if we accept that the fetus is a lving H. sapiens.
The difference between not having a right and not being allowed to excercise them is, of course, very philosophical.
Although it’s a bit inflamatory I’ll fully concede the for some/may/most women being unwilling is the reason for abortion. For some/many/most it’s more being unable or forced into it.
It may be a bit inflammatory if one wishes to consider it so, but is it an untrue or unfair description of what’s going on? The human in question is living at the immediate (and growing) personal bodily intrusion of another human who wishes otherwise. Assume her reasons for wishing so are irrelevant. Does that first human’s right to life still win out?
So would you also believe that those unwilling women have the right to their abortions, and you would respect their right to abortion?
And what do you mean by unable or forced?
Because they don’t have a mind. The same reason we can harvest the organs of the brain dead. By the standards we apply everywhere else a fetus is not a person - the only reason to legally define a fetus as a person is to justify oppressing women. It simply doesn’t fit with the rest of our laws.
It is interesting that we see some religious people attack science for supposedly saying we have the answer to all questions. Here is one that science does not claim to have the answer to. You can measure brain waves and heart rate, you can measure size and weight, but you can’t measure personhood.
Now, the good thing about calling this a philosophical discussion is that it implies that it is proper to let people on each side act according to their opinions. That seems a fair resolution to me.
And the reason that some religions drive this is that they claim to have the absolute answer to philosophical questions from God, and having such have the right to impose their answers on everyone else. Including religions which have different answers from God. My understanding is that a bris is not done right after birth because in ancient times so many babies died early that it was pointless to name them - or consider them people. It is not like an 8 day old understand the covenant any better than an 8 minute old. That certainly means that a fetus is not a person. What right does a cardinal or a minister to impose their religious views on a (female) rabbi?
And of course anyone claiming divine guidance on this issue is free to produce God to tell us directly. He might say “Schmuck, of course a fetus is not a person. Why do you think I let so many miscarry?”
No, for those (some/many/most) where the woman is unwilling it is not untrue. I will completely accept that pro-life has the consecuence of making women carry on with pregnancies they do not want.
I reject the “personal body intrusion” concept (sounds like calling murder “enthropy facilitating event”), but yes, the fetus right to life wins out.
If fetuses could develop in artifical wombs or (this is even more sci-fi) harmlessly tranfered into the wombs of willing women, I would have no problem with that going on.
There is no rigth to an abortion, so, no.
It’s common, at least in my country, for women to have abortion not because “it is my body and I have chosen to take control of it” but more a dad/mum/boyfriend/husband/lover threatening the woman of being kicked out/left out/hit if they don’t carry on with the abortion.
One of the charities I support helps women (usually teenagers) in this situation.
I accpet that they don’t have a mind, but they don’t have a mind in the same way that my kids don’t have a driver’s licence. it’s a different concept no yet attaing a level than losing it.
You say “legally define” and my question was “scientifically define”.
Scientifically a fetus is a *Homo sapiens *with a unique genetic code, a new member of the species.
When I ask for “science, please” it’s usually to the people who only accept science as evidence for anything and to see that they want to justify their personal views as science.
The fact that we can concentrate on the philosophical rather than the scientific doesn’t mean, for me at least, that it is in the end a truly philosophical endeavor, i.e., a mental game.
I concede that religious views on personhood have changed in the last 5000 years. Christianity, however from the very beginnig, encouraged almost immediate baptism. My mother-in-law was a nurse in the newborn section of he hospital and tells me (and this is a common story) of nurses baptising kids who were going to die.
The point is that, try to be in my shoes, if I’m going to impose my views on you, I’m gonna do it for “don’t kill the baby” rather than “masturbation is a sin”.
I am sad to hear of this forced abortion situation in your country, can you cite examples of this?
But do you really believe the solution to this problem would be to limit the reproductive choices for all women?
I myself would fight for the rights of women who wanted to have children, but were being forced to have abortions. This is part of being pro choice.
Which is a deeply anti-woman thing to do. You might as well support raping women; if you can forcible use a woman’s body for one purpose against her will, why not for another purpose? You’ve already established the principle that her body belongs to you, not her.
Nonsense. Potential is irrelevant; every sperm cell is a “potential person”; with cloning, so is every cell in your body. are you committing murder when you scratch and itch?
So is a brain dead corpse. So is a cancer cell. It’s just mindless tissue.
Christianity is a sick, evil belief system that puts dogma above the welfare of people and is not a valid justification for anything.
I see little of this. What I do see is that when someone says “science has shown there is no need for a god” it gets permuted to “science proves there is no god” which is pretty rare, especially outside the context of conversation. Dawkins, for one, has never said this - at least not in any of the books of his I’ve read.[
I think philosophy is a bit more than a mind game. If you agree that science cannot give us the answer, how else do you propose to analyze the problem? I’d say it is an ethical problem, and ethics are a branch of philosophy.
Being Jewish, if some nurse did me the favor of baptizing my baby I’d have her ass fired. Religions change somewhat, but they also split. The spinoffs should not seek to impose their views on those in the original religion. Mormons shouldn’t be allowed to close down Starbucks because their supposedly later revelation goes beyond what other Christians believe, and Catholics should not impose their views on abortion or birth control on Jews. If God did in fact ordain personhood at 8 days, this doesn’t change just because almost all babies now survive that long. And I’ll take maximum freedom, thank you. Calling a fetus a baby does not make it one.
Consider the consequences of your recognized consequence of a woman forced to carry on with a pregnancy she doesn’t want. If she’s young, does she drop out of school? If she’s poor, does her poverty deepen? If she’s older, does she run health risks that may not be detected until later in the pregnancy? If she’s in an abusive relationship, with the abuse worsen? Of course, her reason might be relatively trivial, too, but are you comfortable with the distinct possibility of worsening the life of a woman to accomplish… what, exactly? An unwanted baby? Is society so desperate for babies that it needs to resort to these kinds of tactics?
You’re making an arbitrary determination, as am I, but in my case I’m willing to trust the judgement of the person most affected - the pregnant woman - because the value of over-riding her strikes me as tenuous at best. She can have another baby when the timing suits her better. Or she can better concentrate on her existing children. Or she can decide to not have any children, as it suits her. I’m hard pressed to think of a reason the state should interfere in this.
I’ll try to find some relevant quotes.
It’s not an easy choice and it’s horrible in many senses. However, repoductive choice is second fiddle to life.
I will not again answer anything you have to say.
I can only take so many “you want to rape women” and “your beliefs are sick and evil” without even a hint of common courtesy before deciding it’s not worth it.
I know it’s an over-reaction from my part.
I know that philosphy is more than a mind game and ethical problems do not have clear-cut solutions. for me, the solution is that personhood only after birth makes personhood dependent on “geography” (inside or outside the womb). It doens’t stand to reason that a 6-month premie is a person and a 7-month fetus isn’t, so you go back to the very beginning: conception.
The baptising goes on in a more than 99% (at least nominal) christian country and would never be done if there was doubt.
Mormons (because there are human beings) have the same right to decide what is sold in their neighborhood as the rest. While their own motivation can be religious it shouldn’t invalidate their right.
As I said, it’s not a nice thing, but if you beleive it’s a human I can’t see any other choice if they can’t be applied to a 1-day old.
I used an example a time ago. If you help a slave to escape, he might be in a worse situation than before, but he is free. I couldn’t blame a person for no taking care of all the consequences of the escape.
You know, there are a lot of people who hold that animals have every bit as much of a right to life as humans, and that killing and eating animals is the same as murdering humans and eating them. However, just because those are their very sincere beliefs, does not obligate me to abide by those beliefs.
I’ve no objection to extending full human rights to a 1-day old. Being inside the body of another human, though, is a rather different circumstance.
Heck, I’m a fully-formed, sapient, walking, talking human being by any reasonable standard, but were I somehow transplanted into the unwilling body of another human being, I can’t say I have any reasonable expectation of being allowed to stay there. Heck, I don’t have a reasonable expectation to stay in someone’s house for months at a time against their will. I’m happy to recognize the existence of “duty”, where one is obliged to provide food, clothing and housing for one’s children from birth to 18 years of age, but I’m not eager to extend the obligation beyond that.
I don’t fully understand your point. Is the fetus the “slave” in this analogy? Are we protecting its right to leave the womb even if the mother/slave-owner wants to keep it in? Is the unwillingly pregnant woman the slave?
That probably has something to do with how bad your answers are.
Someone who wants to force women to go through pregnancy and childbirth against their will is in no position to complain about a “lack of common courtesy”. And what you obviously really hate is the fact I’m willing to actually describe what you want done without prettying it up. And I didn’t say you wanted to rape women, I was pointing out that you wanted to do something that was the equivalent of rape, and that if you can justify forbidding abortion you can justify rape. In both cases you are asserting the right to use a woman’s body against her will for your own purposes. If the rape comparison bothers you so much, you could also use the same logic to justify forced kidney donation instead.
As long as the victim is a woman of course; somehow the people whose bodies it is “necessary” to use always just happen to be women.