When does a human fetus become a person with personhood rights, and why do you think so?

Great Debates
101

Her body has to deliver a baby either way. Whether that baby is alive or not when she does that is not a question of only her bodily autonomy.

She has a baby inside of her that needs to come out one way or the other. It’s not a question of ‘deliver a live baby’ vs ‘go home’, it’s a question of ‘deliver a live baby’ or ‘deliver a dead baby’.

What I said was

I did say “almost”. I am sure you could find some Dr Mengele types who are willing to terminate a 41 week old baby in the womb and deliver it dead, either in corrupt countries without proper medical oversight or who are willing to perform the procedure even if it means losing their medical license.

102

Well, no. In one case, it’s going to deliver a foetus, not a baby.
And she gets to choose how that happens.

If it’s not alive, it’s not a baby.
How it happens is entirely up to her.

No, she has a foetus inside her. Whether it gets to be a baby is her choice.

Argumentum ad passiones isn’t going to turn the aborted foetus into a “baby”.

And if she wants that option, it’s her choice.

Or some pre-Roe hero types.

And please - Dr Mengele? Could an appeal to emotion be any more blatant?

103

Yes, which is why the definition of personhood must come first.

But some people believe that a person is a person from conception and therefore no such thing as a fetus exists. You seem not to agree with that definition, but it cannot be conveniently ignored in law just in favor of your personal morality.

That is exactly my objection to this thread, and why the arguments made, however lengthy, are irrelevant to my understanding of the issue. Of course morality informs law, but huge numbers of laws are offensive to someone’s individual morality. That law and morality are intertwined is important but not dispositive.

104

A fetus that’s physically identical to, if not more developed than, a baby in NICU. That’s a semantics game; any cognitive ability that makes a human human is more present in a 41 week old baby that is still in the womb than a 30 week old baby in the NICU. The definitional difference between a fetus and baby does not justify killing one of them.

In the same linguistic sense than an asteroid and a meteor are different things, sure. But at the end of the day they are both chunks of rock, and a baby and a fetus of the same age are both human beings at the same level of development, regardless of their position in space.

There’s a vast gulf between someone performing a medically accepted procedure that’s illegal at the time in a given country, and going against both the law and the medical community’s consensus.

If you know of any other doctors who’d be willing to kill a 41 week old fetus when there is absolutely no medical necessity for doing so, you’re welcome to cite them; the only one I’m aware of is indeed Mengele.

105

You might be right, but that has nothing to do with my point. My point is that the personhood of the fetus doesn’t matter with respect to the mother’s choice. If she wants to end the pregnancy, she gets to end the pregnancy, at any time and for any reason.

106

It’s not physically identical. For one thing, it’s located inside a person, and attached to said person.

No, it’s an existential matter, and not a game at all.

Where did i say babyhood is dependent on cognitive ability?

begging the question. Foetuses aren’t alive yet.

Disagree. Their “position in space” is all that we need regard.

Abortion being wrong was the medical consensus at the time. Hell, the abortion being illegal part is largely because of the AMA and people like Horatio Storer.

…which of course means no such physicians could exist.

And foetuses can’t be killed, you’re confusing them with babies again.

107

For the record, and for what it’s worth, I disagree with pretty much all of your assertions. Maybe I missed it somewhere, what is the basis for the things you assert as true? At present, you and @Babale are just slinging words back and forth, but at least I think I understand where he is coming from.

eta: I hope this thread doesn’t become another 2-person slanging match.

108

Being in the wrong place is not the basis by which I decide whether someone is a person or not.

Aside from their location and from a few experiences which one baby has had and the other has not, the two babies are the same. There are no internal, intrinsic differences between them. There is no magic in the moment of birth that imbues one with personhood.

What is existential about whether you are inside another person or not? It’s the same baby, in fact the 41 week old one is more developed, cognitively advanced, more like a human and less like a clump of cells in every way that counts (aside from the geographic).

You didn’t, you seem to think it is dependent on their location rather than on any intrinsic property of the baby.

They very obviously are. There’s a huge difference between a fetus and a stillbirth. One is alive, one is not.

Yes, they obviously can. If you cut a fetus’s umbilical cord in the womb, it will die, its tissue will rot, and it will poison and potentially kill the mother. There’s a huge difference between a live fetus and a dead fetus.

109

I agree with this, I hope other people post their thoughts as well, in the meantime I will take a break from this thread because I think I’ve presented my position clearly and said what there is to say about it.

110

Babies are what you call infant human beings after they’re born.
A foetus is a developmental stage that has not yet achieved independence. Terminating it is no more killing than my appendix is killed when I have an appendectomy.

Clearer?

But it is how you and others decide whether that person should live or die in many other situations with adult human beings, never mind foetuses. Personhood isn’t the fundamental issue here, personhood rights are. I can agree the foetus constitutes a person and it changes nothing about my argument.

“Aside from the whole point”

Sure, if you say so. And…?

It’s fundamental to your existence as either a foetus or a baby. Seems pretty existential to me.

And I know it’s pretty fundamental to the existence of the pregnant person/mother.

Nope. One of them isn’t even a baby.

That’s exactly right. Except for the fact that in one case it isn’t a baby.

Not in any way that counts. They are still just as attached to their mother as her kidneys are, and you wouldn’t say individual kidneys are alive.

No, it will be terminated.

My, that’s some very vivid imagery you’re employing there.

There’s a huge difference between a supported vs an unsupported foetus. That doesn’t make the supported foetus alive yet.

111

I disagree. I’m not sure what that point is, but there is a point when fetus = baby, and it starts to be treated as such. I’d say viability is that point.

Like I was saying, the difference between a baby that’s one week late (41 week fetus) and a 1 week old newborn is just one of location, not anything else, and that baby should have protections and rights of its own.

I’m not even a pro-life type, but I think that pro-choice isn’t an absolute right either. What makes it ok for a mother to abort a 41 week old fetus, but not murder her newborn?

112

So we disagree. I think if there’s a little person inside you, it doesn’t matter how it got there, you have the right to evict it. Doesn’t matter the age of the little person, your age, your gender, etc. You have the right to evict it no matter what. Could be a little tiny 50 year old violinist, could be a 40 week fetus, could be a glint in the milkman’s eye… you get to choose in all cases.

I understand that some disagree.

113

So, post viability, a pregnant person takes a roller coaster ride which, tragically, results in the fetus being stillborn. Murder? Deranged indifference to human life? What charge would you suggest?

114

Your position was clear before. The ways words are used constitutes no proof of the truth of your assertions.

Not to put words in your mouth, but your position seems to be (and maybe it was you who said this directly way upthread) that a woman’s right to her own body supersedes any rights the fetus may have, and that therefore any and all abortions are/should be strictly by the choice of the mother. Is that a correct summary of your position?

115

you keep making this distinction as somehow being dispositive to your argument, without providing any reason why it should legally or morally distinguish the two scenarios.

116

I keep re-reading and trying to steelman your argument in my head, but I am not succeeding… either I am still not fully understanding it, or at least I’m not able to follow its full chain of logic.

It SEEMS to me you’re saying two separate things.

  1. A mother’s right to have control over her own body supersedes the rights of the thing growing inside her.

On this point, I think many (most?) people in this thread already agree — for their own different reasons, perhaps, but ultimately all reaching that same conclusion. Is that a correct interpretation so far?

But the second thing you’re saying, I think (?), is that:

  1. You believe #1 because the “thing growing inside” her is not alive; it is merely a blob of cells (my phrasing) in a developmental stage, similar to an appendix or other organ. It is not a baby, not a human, and not an independent lifeform, regardless of its gestational state and regardless of its viability. It is and will remain a fetus until the moment of birth, but the “moment” of that birth depends on not on a developmental stage, but on its physical location (inside its mother vs outside).

Is that correct so far?

But if so… I am still confused as to:

A) What is the difference between a birthed “baby” and a “supported fetus” (both of which are outside of the mother)? If it’s not the gestational stage that matters, but rather the physical location, then at what point does an externally raised, supported fetus then become a baby…?

And:

B) So then when exactly do these “personhood rights” start, if not at the inception of personhood? Does a fetus have those rights? Does a supported fetus outside the mother? Does a birthed but non-viable baby? And why?

On one hand, I think it’s easy to say that “a mother’s rights supersede the blob of cell’s”. Even my extremist “post-birth abortion” view is compatible with that belief. So in that regard, I think we’re both saying “it doesn’t matter when personhood starts; the mother is more important”.

But then where we diverge is what happens once it’s outside of her. Even I don’t think that a fetus is subhuman; my argument was that it’s OK to kill them despite their humanity (because human-ness is not a good test for whether something should be morally killable).

But you have a different argument, I think: That it’s OK to kill them as long as they’re inside the mother. Or rather, that by definition they cannot be “killed” so long as they’re still inside the mother, because they’re still just a fetus and not a baby, and not yet alive.

IF that is a correct understanding of your position (which I’m really not sure about), then… doesn’t it logically follow that the gestational/developmental state doesn’t matter, and that ultra-late-term abortions (like mere minutes or hours before birth) should still be allowed? As long you “destroy” the thing (whether you “terminate” or “kill” it) before the very minute the mother “pops”, it’s OK? As the thing is trying to come out, someone could just shove it back in and destroy it while it’s back inside and then it’s merely a termination, not murder? Surely I’m misunderstanding…? (A less graphic version of this might be gestational surrogacy; that blob of cells might go from inside one mother into a lab and then into a second mother; its humanity differs depending on the particular minute into that operation).

The physical location of the thing cannot be the only criterion that matters here. Right…?

117

That cannot possibly work when moral considerations are extremely subjective and diverse. That was the whole point of my earlier post stating my belief that legal and moral considerations have to be treated here as completely separate issues.

There are some who believe that a zygote is morally a “person” and abortions must morally be proscribed at any stage, from the moment of conception. Some are motivated by religious beliefs, sometimes ostensibly derived from the Bible. Some of these people might favour other religion-based prohibitions and might enjoy living in a Christian theocracy. They might favour prohibiting abortions entirely even if it puts the mother’s life at risk. Others might consider abortions allowable only in the first trimester, or only in the first two, while others see no moral objection to abortions at any stage of pregnancy. Others might be willing to make exceptions to abortion prohibitions in certain special cases, such as rape, and others still say not even then.

How are you going to resolve all these disparate moral views into laws that make sense and satisfy everyone’s moral position?

You can’t, and if you try, the result is divisive and confrontational, and laws prohibiting abortion are often disastrous for the women affected.

One moral consideration that everyone should be able to agree on is that after birth, when a baby is physically independent of its mother and is its own living, breathing entity, that certainly then it is truly a person. Then, and only then, does the law have a place in protecting babies against actual murder (infanticide) and abuse. Until then, the law has no business meddling in the personal morality of a woman and her relationship with her doctors.

118

Isn’t this a restating of MrDibble’s “location”-based argument? What is magical about the particular moment of birth that makes it worthy of sudden, additional legal protection? Why stop at birth, if the child an hour before or an hour after birth is not meaningfully different in terms of development or consciousness? It doesn’t really address the question of why personhood rights cannot begin later than birth. Surely they are not really independent for many months or years after birth.

Yes, the law is necessarily a mishmash of compromises between opposing factions. But I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s a given that “no later than birth” is a universal moral absolute; certainly it wasn’t in times past when infanticide was more commonly accepted. And even today, you can find people who have no moral qualms with killing young children. I mean, my belief is already pretty extreme, but even I would not extend that timeframe to several years past birth, but there are plenty of people who would and do prey upon children that old, including killing them. The law would find their actions illegal but they would not necessarily consider their own actions immoral. (The rest of us would, of course, and luckily for the children the law agrees with the majority in this case.)

Human development is a long continuum starting from fertilization and continuing well into early adulthood, with large variances between individuals… not some sudden thing that happens the moment they exit the mother. That we choose that moment for legal enforcement is a social contract in our particular time and place, not some biological truth or moral necessity.

119

Because it’s a natural bright line where a fetus becomes a baby, and constitutes the appropriate place for the law to step in. Questions like, “but isn’t a newborn essentially the same as a late-term fetus?” muddy the waters because they immediately raise the question of how “late” is “late-term”, and how far back in the pregnancy can this argument be taken, and you inevitably end up with the argument that a zygote is a “person”.

This is not merely a hypothetical argument. Following rulings from the Supreme Court of Canada, this is exactly the legal position in Canada. The government doesn’t meddle in abortion matters, nor interfere between a woman and her doctors. But contrary to some of the slippery-slope arguments of anti-abortion doomsayers, infanticide is still murder and always will be.

They are physically their own independent being, separated from the mother. Of course they’re going to be dependent on someone for food, clothing, and shelter, but they’re no longer part of the mother. Mothers have died in childbirth and children have done just fine.

That doesn’t disprove my point, it reinforces the subjectivity of moral values. Cultures that practice infanticide – and some still exist today – consider it morally acceptable. But in the broad consensus of western culture what they’re doing is abhorrent and here it would be severely punished. This isn’t even about the moral question of when a baby becomes a “person” – some of these same cultures engage in “honour killings” of grown women.

120

When they’re born.

Not because they weren’t alive, or weren’t human, before that.

Because at that point they cease to also be a part of their mom’s body.

And because we do women a gross dehumanizing thing when we say we’re entitled to step in and stop them if they decide an abortion is necessary.