This is a good point. It can only be refuted by a religious belief. Anything can be refuted by a religious belief and frequently is, just as anything can be proved by a religious belief. They should have no bearing on anyone outside their religion and often are not taken remotely seriously by people within it.
This is a good point. Modern medical science has made viability a long period of time rather than a point. We’re well past the time when the quickening,
In pregnancy terms, quickening is the moment in pregnancy when the mother starts to feel the fetus’s movement in the uterus. It was believed in ancient philosophy (an idea that was later adopted by some religions and legal theories) that the quickening marked the moment that a soul entered the fetus, termed ensoulment.
although a logical compromise to an unknown, can be given credence.
That leaves only birth. When exactly “birth” takes place can be debated and nitpicked, but a logical definition would be when the connection to the mother is severed and the baby becomes an separate person (even if conjoined). A good point that has also been made.
First I want to thank everyone for an excellent discussion so far. There is a lot to unpack.
I didn’t raise this in the OP, but for many people in the abortion debate it matters how conception happened. Hence the frequent expectations for exceptions to anti-abortion laws based on rape and other potential factors. The point of this seems to be that, if the pregnancy was based on consensual unprotected sex, does the mother bear any responsibility for the existence of the fetus, and does that responsibility (if any) figure in the equation at all? It seems to me that if the mother’s rights are paramount, the fetus effectively has no rights, and is therefore not a person. (I’m leaving out the inherent unfairness of the mother bearing the physical burden of pregnancy and the father none; I’m just not sure where to go with that.)
It’s occurring to me now that the question should have been about when a fetus becomes fully a person with a full person’s rights. That is, in fact, what I meant, if I did not make it specific enough to be clear.
This view would seem to put the act of abortion in a different category from murder or even homicide, even more than, say, justified self-defense, in the sense that ipso facto you wouldn’t have to prove anything (as one does for self-defense). In no other situation could a person terminate the life of another person without having anything to answer for. Or else the fetus is not a person and has no (or fewer) rights.
Also, if folks feel like it, we can discuss whether the possibility of ex-utero pregnancy would change the equation at all. In other words, if a fetus could be transplanted to a machine at, say, a very early point, does that change the status of the fetus’s rights vs. the mother’s rights?
A legal and moral debate is what I wanted to have here, based on science. I don’t understand how the personhood of the fetus is not the basis for what rights it has. Do you want to elaborate?
Sentience means having sense perceptions and consciousness. It is not the same as self-awareness, or forming attachments. It seems to me obvious that newborns have sense perceptions of pain, discomfort, and hunger at a minimum.
This seems like an absurdly arbitrary endorsement of an artificial binary classification that doesn’t at all correspond to the biology of what actually happens in fetal development.
An embryo/fetus is developing continuously in utero, not suddenly transforming from one sort of being into another. [ETA: as @Jackmannii noted.] There is nothing in the least “nonsensical” about acknowledging that that biological reality makes any imposed threshold of “personhood” fundamentally artificial and arbitrary.
Since for practical reasons we can’t decree that, for example, a fetus that has attained partial personhood may be partially aborted, we have to impose a legal personhood threshold that’s an absolute binary. But there’s absolutely no biologically meaningful reason why that threshold needs to be placed either at fertilization or at birth, rather than at some intermediate point.
To answer the OP, as you may have guessed, I think it doesn’t make any biological sense to describe a fetus suddenly acquiring “personhood” status at any single instant, and any such definition of the “moment of fetal personhood” is a legal fiction. That being the case, I think putting that unavoidable legal-fiction threshold somewhere around the start of the third trimester makes the most sense for practical purposes.
Why is that a problem, though? Why shouldn’t advances in medical science change the equation as far as what is morally acceptable?
I don’t think that’s a satisfying definition. But I do think it raises a potential problem with viability.
We would all agree that a 41 week old fetus shouldn’t be aborted moments before birth unless it’s medically necessary to protect the life of the mother, right?
And likewise, we would all agree that even if medical technology advances to the point where you can take an egg and a sperm, combine them outside the body, and grow a fetus to term entirely without human involvement - that this wouldn’t make Plan B murder.
Which is why I think some level of brain development is what truly matters.
This is a good point for addressing the viability only option. I think it’s a fatal flaw.
IMHO if we had these sorts of perfect artificial wombs, then: before a certain point in development, it would make no difference and something like plan B or an abortion would still be morally neutral; after that point, if transplanting the fetus is not some horribly dangerous procedure, that would be the moral way to terminate a pregnancy.
I think the apparent intractability of a question like this stems from the fact that it entangles two completely different questions that absolutely have to be kept separate.
The first question is: at what point is a fetus or baby entitled to the legal protections to which all persons have a fundamental right.
The second question is: at what point is an unborn fetus entitled to the protections of medical ethics and considerations of basic morality.
The answer to the first question is: when the baby is born. Full stop. Any other answer leads to the kinds of horrific situations we’ve been seeing especially in the US after Roe v Wade was overturned. The law – often vicious and uncaring, overly broad, incapable of nuance – has no business meddling in very personal decisions made between a woman and her caregivers. When it does, it can cause no end of grief for the mother, for the baby, and even for her doctors.
Having established that, the second question is much clearer. It’s simply a personal decision between a woman and her doctors based on the specific situation, the needs, desires, and moral beliefs of the mother, and the medical ethics of the doctors which themselves might be driven by personal moral beliefs. If the woman wants a relatively late-term abortion that a doctor refuses to perform, she might have to seek a different doctor. In general, medical ethics tends to make doctors shy away from late-term abortions. But the crucially important thing is that laws, and the ignorant politicians who enact them, have absolutely no place here.
Ants have perceptions of pain, discomfort, and hunger. I don’t think ants are considered sentient. You’re the OP, so if you want to derail this into a discussion of what sentience is, have at it, but I think sentience doesn’t matter, because the pregnant person’s rights are paramount.
Why? Doesn’t the pregnant person have any say as to whether they want to have offspring in the world? In any case, it’s not like that kind of procedure would be free – who is on the hook for paying for that, and for the subsequent care of the baby? Would it be moral to take the millions of otherwise aborted fetus and put them all into the foster system?
I am not a fan of abortion, but as a male I recognize the woman’s absolute right to abort.
I think the child becomes a “real person” at the event that used to be known as “the quickening”, when the mother first feels her child stir in her womb. That could be the first sign of consciousness, but impossible to know.
I have absolutely no evidence to support this, and I don’t think anyone can have evidence to answer the OP.
That is why I am - contradictorally, both pro-life and pro-choice. As a man, I will support either. I don’t get to dictate, although I do skew towards pro-choice.
I don’t really follow. You think that the “child” becomes a real person (with personhood rights) at the quickening, but you still would allow abortions after that point?
So, then when is a parent not allowed to kill this real person? When they demonstrate object permanence? When they show reasoning skills in basic math? Up until they’re 18 years old?
I think that’s great, but then you don’t really believe the fetus is a person with personhood rights, because individuals with personhood rights can’t be arbitrarily murdered by their parents.
To be clear, I’m glad you’re firmly pro-choice, but your position seems inconsistent to me.
Right. Nature is messy and there are gray areas over everything, and the law very often has to draw lines in that fog. I don’t see anything intrinsically wrong or irrational about drawing a line at N weeks the same as we draw a line for drinking, marriage etc.
In terms of my answer to the OP though, my opinion is at birth, with the caveat that I prefer a phased approach. I know it’s disinformation that women at 39 weeks are just having abortions on a momentary whim, but I do think it’s appropriate that the framework for this procedure, legal and medical, is such that it would be hard to do that.
The pregnant person has say about whether they want offspring in the world up until the point where that offspring already exists at which point, no, they can’t retroactively decide that they don’t want that offspring anymore. And what makes the offspring “exist” is when it reaches a certain level of development, not when it happens to come out.
Same people that are on the hook for taking care of babies dropped off at fire stations. Society at large.
Once again, before a certain point of development, I said:
No one is talking about taking out eight cells and putting them in an incubator. And there aren’t “millions of otherwise aborted” fetuses that were aborted at 20 weeks or beyond, we are talking about a vanishingly small minority of pregnancies, less than 1%; and when abortions do happen that late, it’s almost always because of medical necessity.
Totally agree, so why would you require the small portion of the 1% that aren’t medically necessary to move the fetus to an incubator? Seems like you’re solving a problem that barely exists.
But, here in the real world, there are the occasional abortions that happens past the point where the fetus could be prematurely delivered and might make it in an NICU, and I don’t think the law should opine on that.
I like Canada’s approach, which essentially has no laws about it, leaving it up to the pregnant person and medical ethics.
…because I consider them to be people? I think if you have a human baby that’s 30 weeks in the NICU and they are able to survive on their own and develop into functional humans, that entity should be treated as human; that’s true whether that entity is in said NICU or if it’s still inside another human.
Also, I’m not sure what you mean by:
There are two types of medically necessary abortions. Situations where the fetus is unviable, in which case keeping it or removing it doesn’t matter, it can’t grow into a full fledged human anyways; and situations where the fetus is viable but the pregnancy has gone wrong to the point where mother and child will not both survive if it goes to term. In that latter scenario, if artificial wombs exist, why would you kill the fetus? Just transfer it to the artificial womb where both they and the mother can survive.
For reasons that aren’t medical necessity? I highly doubt that happens with any sort of frequency. Cite?I’d expect a doctor who did something like that to be crucified by medical ethics review boards.
I think Canada’s approach is good but not because I think that very late term abortions for elective reasons are moral or acceptable but because I trust medical professionals making ethical decisions to agree with me that an “elective” abortion at the very end of pregnancy is unethical.
If I thought that doctors were willy nilly performing 40 week abortions I would probably agree that a law is needed to stop that. But since doctors are not doing that, a law wouldn’t stop bad doctors from doing bad things, it would stop good doctors from making very difficult life and death decisions properly which will lead to harm to women in an extremely tough situation.
I’m using the definitions of sentience = “I think”, and sapience = “I think therefore I am”. By that standard I’m pretty sure human fetuses are sentient at some point before birth. Sentient but not sapient.
This is where I’m at as well. They aren’t self aware, but they are aware. IMHO the awareness itself, combined with being a human who will, given time, become self aware, is enough to be classified as a person.
To clarify, I’m drawing a fine line that others might not. I think there are some cases where a person might not be granted the full rights (or have their rights restricted in some way, that’s probably a better way of putting it) of personhood due to things like their rights conflicting with the rights of other people. Pregnancy and abortion is one such situation.
You’re the one who brought up the possibility of growing a fetus in an external womb that would otherwise have been aborted. If that never happens, then, I’m not really sure what that was about.
And I am saying that AFAIK no, it is not the case that fetuses are aborted for entirely elective reasons after the point where the fetus could be delivered and would survive; I think in that scenario an abortion is clearly morally wrong, and I think the medical community agrees with me, which is why you aren’t going to find doctors willing to perform these kinds of abortions even today and even in states where abortion restrictions are very low.
I obviously wasn’t asking you for a cite that babies are grown in artificial wombs, since that technology has only been tested on animals that obviously isn’t the case. I am asking for a cite that these abortions ever happen at all today.
I don’t know if I agree with that. I have no idea when a fetus becomes a person with all personhood rights, except that I am certain it happens somewhere between the moment of conception and the moment of birth. But it really doesn’t matter to any of my beliefs - I don’t think abortion should be legal if and only if the fetus doesn’t have all personhood rights, nor do I think abortion is morally acceptable up until the moment of birth because that’s when the fetus gains personhood. And to be honest, I’ve never been entirely sure why the debate does seem focused on that point. Nobody can know for certain exactly when that point has arrived but legality doesn’t need to depend solely on that point - it can be illegal to kill an animal even though it is certainly not a person. And morality need not depend on that point either- it can be moral to cause a person’s death in some situations but not others , just as having a vet euthanize my sick dog might be morally acceptable while shooting my dog simply because I dislike it might not be.