I never had any conversations of that sort with my mother. Maybe it’s because I never had children myself, but I actually never discussed my mother’s pregnancy with her at all.
I know you think you’re trying to set up some sort of “gotcha” momement, so let me get straight to the point.
I don’t think of the non-viable fetus that eventually became me as a person, just like I don’t think a cup of flour, a cup a of sugar and stick of butter is a cake.
No one is denying that the mother will go through various biological, physical and emotional changes while pregnant. Asking your mother about her life during the months leading up to your birth doesn’t imply some sense of self or existential questions about when you became…you.
In fact, one could use that same line of questioning to draw a bright line in the sand between the moment you emerged from your mother’s womb, and everything before that time.
If your mother mentioned that in the year or so before she was even pregnant, she quit smoking, started taking prenatal vitamins, ate healthier and drank less, would you infer that you existed before conception?
Similarly, if asking about where you were conceived (or why they named you “Buick”) proves you came into existence at conception, does that imply that asking how long they were ‘trying’ before she was pregnant mean you existed before conception?
You really have to stop making statements like that is if they’re fact, especially when the only evidence you have to back it up are assumptions you’ve made.
If nothing else, the simple fact that someone questions events that happened before they were born in no way implies they feel they existed during that time. To be clear, I’m not saying that no one feels that way, just that I don’t think it’s a common enough feeling to justify the logical gap between “I asked my mom what foods she ate while she was pregnant with me” and “therefore existence begins and conception”.
Yeah. My particular reaction to anti-abortion people saying, in effect, ‘but how would you have felt if your mother had aborted you?’ is that I wouldn’t have felt anything, I wouldn’t have existed; any more than I would have existed if my parents hadn’t met, or had met but hadn’t had sex that particular day.
Do I feel that I was in some sense there when I was, say, an 8 1/2 month fetus? Sort of; but not entirely. Whatever was there at that point thought, if it was thinking, so unlike me that, even up to two or three years after I was born, those memories are inaccessible to me; and the few memories I have from being two or three are . . . strange; they imply different thought processes than I’m using now.
But a zygote or blastocyst or embryo? There isn’t any brain there yet. While I’m not entirely my brain, I’m certainly not there without one.