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When born. That is the beginning of the infant developmental stage. Terms like "baby" are non-technical colloquial terms, and you can call your pet cat a baby and still have the same weight as calling a six week embryo like the one in this dish:
Infant, like I just said.So, what is the technical term when it has been alive outside the womb after 3 months? Or is the term "baby" still a non-technical colloquial term?
Etymologically, fetus has been used since the 14th century, it's an old Latin term for unborn offspring (in womb or egg or seed). Baby came around at roughly the same time but was used as equivalent of infant and newborn offspring. Equivocating baby with fetus is a new phenomenon.And what word did they use before the word "fetus" ever existed? What was it called before that?
Infant, like I just said.
Etymologically, fetus has been used since the 14th century, it's an old Latin term for unborn offspring (in womb or egg or seed). Baby came around at roughly the same time but was used as equivalent of infant and newborn offspring. Equivocating baby with fetus is a new phenomenon.
Like I said though, what you call it makes little difference to me outside pure academics.
I dont view ancient Hebrew as more of an authority on developmental science or medical or legal language than ancient Egyptian.That is a little more modern for me. I use the legal term from the Hebrew which is way before the 14th Century:
Ex 21: If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit departfrom her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.
The Hebrew noun translated "child" in this passage is yeled[4] (yeladim in the plural), and means "child, son, boy, or youth."[5] It comes from the primary root word yalad,[6] meaning "to bear, bring forth, or beget." In the NASB yalad is translated "childbirth" 10 times, some form of "gave birth" over 50 times, and either "bore," "born," or "borne" 180 times.
To each his own...
Today, people usually don't say "I am pregnant with a fetus", usually they say "I have a baby!" way before the actual birth.
But, as you said, makes little difference to me. The "fetus" had a brain, was separate from the mother, had his/her own fingerprints, her own heart beat, her own DNA, her own individual blood, personality and is now a healthy 5lb baby and that is what is important.
That's another subject.I dont view ancient Hebrew as more of an authority on developmental science or medical or legal language than ancient Egyptian.
But as an amusing aside, what you described is assault on the mother, with the fetus being treated as property of the husband which the assailant has to pay a fine. It wasnt treated as a person with separate rights. The bible isn't pro life and explicitly states individuality happens at birth, with the first breath. Plus explicitly details an event where an abortion happened as a result of a purity test.
Obvious snipe at the abortion debate notwithstanding, I hope that the baby and mom continue to be healthy!
Do you struggle this hard with questions like legal age requirements for consent, alchohol, prison, cigarettes, joining the military etc? Although science can give some objective ballpark data from which to decide reasonable limits (just like viability) they have no magic line either.
Imo, as an aside, I've never found the question of personhood relevant to the abortion debate. I would side with women to end a pregnancy literally any time, since I put value on body autonomy more than any person of any age (even if it were an adult in there). Point of viability just changes the process. After viability through induction of labor or c-section.
When born. That is the beginning of the infant developmental stage. Terms like "baby" are non-technical colloquial terms, and you can call your pet cat a baby and still have the same weight as calling a six week embryo like the one in this dish:
I mean, really....if you were told that if you didn't get into the next room RIGHT NOW and save that baby who is choking, he would die...would you say 'no, thanks, I'm just about to have an orgasm and that's more important?
Because that is exactly what people who enter into consensual sex and then abort their babies because 'they didn't mean to,' or 'I can't do this right now,' or 'I changed my mind" are doing.
.
I feel like you missed the rest of that paragraph about other developmental stage laws. We don't say "there's no magic line for when teenagers become adult enough to give medical consent so let's just never allow that to happen. Or always allow it to happen." No, we understand that the line is set on a spectrum but that doesnt mean it's arbitrary.My problem is that you are absolutely right when you say there is no magic line. Everything that is decided about when a child is 'viable,' or a 'person,' or has any rights at all is decided by culture and law...and opinion.
Except for that first part, I mostly agree with you. Abortion is wasteful, hard on the body and could interfere with fertility for when mothers are ready. It can also be devastating on relationships for people who haven't had open and honest communication. Abortion should be a last resort, after much thought, and after taking all precautions.I think that abortion should be very, very difficult to obtain, and birth control should be very, very easy to get. I think that people contemplating having sex should think about what sex produces; human beings, and make their choices BEFORE they enter into that physical relationship.
Pregnancy and childbirth should never be a punishment. Again, I don't care if she actively decided she wanted an abortion just to try it, a world where women are compulsed to give birth is a dystopian nightmare. Because if it were a drunk driver who hit someone and died, you couldn't harvest their organs to save their victim without their consent. A world with criminal abortion is a world where where women are given less rights than corpses.I mean, really....if you were told that if you didn't get into the next room RIGHT NOW and save that baby who is choking, he would die...would you say 'no, thanks, I'm just about to have an orgasm and that's more important?
Because that is exactly what people who enter into consensual sex and then abort their babies because 'they didn't mean to,' or 'I can't do this right now,' or 'I changed my mind" are doing.
Nah, that wasn't me. Pictures of me from 10 years ago weren't even me. Not a cell, not my personality or my identity. Back then I didnt even have a brain in which to house the word 'me' let alone the concept.As for the embryo in the dish...well, you looked like that yourself once. Once you were even smaller than that. And you were still you. There was no chance that when you looked like that, you
Indeed.That's another subject.
Except they didn't. I already explained this.My point was simply that they did call it a child way before fetus was invented, people who get pregnant call it a child.
So did the Israelites most likely. but changed policy post hoc, probably even revised the sacrifice of Isaac post hoc too. *And* used child sacrifice as justification of the genocide of the Canaanites even though there's no actual evidence they practiced it, and even evidence against.Egyptians sacrificed children so I'm not sure you want to go down that route
Quoted for emphasis: young still in the womb. Using it for an infant or born child would have been equivalent to saying a chicken is the egg.Not to mention:
ORIGIN OF FETUS
1350–1400; Middle English < Latin fētus bringing forth of young, hence that which is born, offspring, young still in the womb, equivalent to fē- (v. base attested in L only in noun derivatives, as fēmina woman, fēcundus fecund, etc.; compare Greek thēsthai to suck, milk, Old High German tāan to suck,
If it looks like a young child, sucks like a young child... I guess it's a young child
Of course I would save a baby, because a baby is a fully sentient human being. But answer me this. If a building was burning down and a 5 year old child was screaming in a room that happened to contain a box of 1000 viable frozen embryos that was about to go up in flames, would you save the child, or the embryos? If you would save the child, then you've acknowledged the obvious fact that humans who have been born are worth more than the unborn. If you would save the embryos instead, then congrats, you are a "pro-life" psychopath.
I dont have a lot of time tonight so apologies in advance for the abbreviated reply.
I feel like you missed the rest of that paragraph about other developmental stage laws. We don't say "there's no magic line for when teenagers become adult enough to give medical consent so let's just never allow that to happen. Or always allow it to happen." No, we understand that the line is set on a spectrum but that doesnt mean it's arbitrary.
Viability is set at best chance for survival out of the womb. It's not a 100% rule but it's also not opinion. Far less so than many other legal limits set on developmental stages.
Except for that first part, I mostly agree with you. Abortion is wasteful, hard on the body and could interfere with fertility for when mothers are ready. It can also be devastating on relationships for people who haven't had open and honest communication. Abortion should be a last resort, after much thought, and after taking all precautions.
But for the couple and for the mother's health. But I don't care if they didn't do any prep, if she's had 5 abortions already, if the father wants the child, I would still make abortion available on demand.
Pregnancy and childbirth should never be a punishment. Again, I don't care if she actively decided she wanted an abortion just to try it, a world where women are compulsed to give birth is a dystopian nightmare.
Because if it were a drunk driver who hit someone and died, you couldn't harvest their organs to save their victim without their consent.
A world with criminal abortion is a world where where women are given less rights than corpses.
Nah, that wasn't me. Pictures of me from 10 years ago weren't even me. Not a cell, not my personality or my identity. Back then I didnt even have a brain in which to house the word 'me' let alone the concept.
ut let's say I was me, and I was an adult mind in a six week old embryo inside mymother, and I learned I was about to he aborted. "That's a shame," I would say, "but the womb I'm in is my mother's and I respect her authority over it."
But more realistically, it'd be nothing like your analogy of the baby choking on the table. My capacity for suffering would be less than the chicken you had for dinner.
[/QUOTE][/QUOTE]n fact, as I said in another thread, I'd sooner make vegetarianism compulsory than outlaw abortion. Because eating that chicken objectively caused more suffering than what the contents of that dish had.
No, since abortion is terminating the pregnancy, and I still believe al that should be required for a woman to terminate the pregnancy us "I dont want to be pregnant anymore." Like I said, viability just changes the process. If I could beam a fetus our Star Trek style I would. If live extraction is possible, do it. It'll create population booms with problems of it's own but yeah.And that point is changing all the time. Shoot, we already keep embryos frozen and 'alive' for later implantation, and we save babies at earlier and earlier stages. The law isn't keeping up, either. So what happens when someone finally invents the 'artificial womb?" The one that allows us to grow that fetus from conceptus to 'full term' without having a woman be pregnant?
Would that change your opinion about when abortion is acceptable, and why?
Nope. The days of calling test tube babies less human than those developed in wet squishy wombs us a 1960's sci fi problem. I've got bigger issues with test tub babies hinted earlier, but that's a topic for another thread another day.If that becomes possible, would that change your mind about the 'humanness' of the human being raised that way?
I'm more interested in protecting the mother from state seizure of said womb.......and if that would, how much more important is it to protect the lives of those unborn humans now, since at the moment we CAN'T grow 'em outside a woman's body?
Consent to sex is not consent to complete a pregnancy. Just like consent to dangling off a cliff doesnt foforfeit your right to use medical technology to rectify injury.That's what birth control methods are for; so that no woman is compelled to give birth. She can avoid getting pregnant in the first place. However, if, even if she has used birth control methods responsibly and correctly, her choice to have consensual sex knowing that sex make babies is HER choice. That's when she made it. Consensual sex isn't an accident or an 'oops.' it's a deliberate choice, and one of the consequences just might be....a baby.
I would. Body autonomy trumps need of any and all persons involved. No matter what the 'greater good' is, no matter your background or actions.If they were, I wouldn't have any problems whatsoever in using them, if the victim was a match.
They don't have my such right, especially not at the expense of the will of the mother.It simply gives the fetus one right; the right to try to survive the most dangerous nine months of its life...
I shouldn't have to say this to a Christian but I'm not my DNA. Even physiologically I'm way more than my genes (brain is part of physiology and it includes the process by which I have identity, perceive my experiences, et al). But again, this is getting into the weeds of topics best left for other days.And as a newborn you didn't have the brains or the capability to do anything you can do as an adult, but you were still you. You have grown and learned...but the DNA of that small group of cells is the same DNA that mapped out the adult you are now.
And nobody else is that.
And you would never have been anything else BUT you. Physiologically, that is.
Murder is a legal term, not an ethics term. The qualification for murder is law.So your Qualification for murder is whether the victim suffers?
But again, the semantics game is purely academic. We don't define medical or legal terms by their etymological usage.
False dichotomy...and one that has been tried before.
You save what you can save.
If you can save the five year old but can't save the embryos (and frankly, saving the embryos would be flippin' impossible...don't you know know how those things are stored? Here's a hint; you won't find them in a beer cooler) then you save the five year old.
If you can't save the five year old but you CAN save the embryos (again, saving the embryos would be flippin' impossible...don't you know how those things are stored? Tanks of liquid nitrogen, and if the building is on fire, they are ALREADY gone!) then you save the embryos. If you can save both, you save both; five year old first because the five year old can help you. The embryos would require ...especially a hundred of them...
Everything in a situation like that is about triage. You save, first, the ones you can save. Then you go back if you can to save others.
And if the building is on fire, the odds of those embryos being viable is slim to spit diddle.
So there is no need to choose according to whose life is more valuable.
Your question is a bit like asking whether an abortion is acceptable if the reason for it is that the pregnancy is endangering the mother's life, or if the fetus is so damaged that it cannot live outside the womb, even at full term. The answer there is 'triage,' too. You save the one you can. Given that a can of liquid nitrogen weighs considerably more than a five year old, and is a WHOLE lot harder to move, what do you think should be done?
It has nothing whatsoever to do with what lives are more valuable.
Oh, and if you want to change things to unreasonable limits and claim that it would be EXACTLY as easy to save the five year old as the embryos, and that you don't have to take even one step further to save one than the other, and that the choice comes down to precisely which life is 'more valuable,'
Then the answer is obviously....save both. 'cause if you can save the five year old that easily, then the embryos will be as easy to save. Now me, I have five kids. I remember hauling a five year old and a three year old and an infant around, and I'm no fire fighter.
But there is never a situation...and I do mean NEVER...where the choice like that is made only on the merits of which life is more valuable, not if the rescuer isn't hoping for money or reward.
So any fire fighter rescuing a trapped family would save the easily transported child and come back to rescue the parents. Or the elder siblings. That's not because s/he thinks that the baby is more important or more valuable, either.
Dang, I wish you people would come up with original arguments.
I shouldn't have to say this to a Christian but I'm not my DNA.
Even physiologically I'm way more than my genes (brain is part of physiology and it includes the process by which I have identity, perceive my experiences, et al). But again, this is getting into the weeds of topics best left for other days.
Developmental maturity doesn't matter to me in the question of abortion availability anyway, so it's purely academic.
Murder is a legal term, not an ethics term. The qualification for murder is law.]/quote]
You are quite right. This is a point I've made several times now. The question under discussion is: should abortion for the sake of convenience be included under the definition of 'murder?"
To refer to the fact that it is no now so included is begging the question and circular. Of course it's not included now. That's the problem. Murder is a legal and cultural term, and thus can be changed at any time. It is not a scientific or medical term.
Ethically I'm a utilitarian consequentialist. Reduce suffering and raise wellness. The suffering of the mother forced to carry to term, and a sentient sapient victim of legal murder, as well as their family and friends, and a society which allows body autonomy to be compromised, and a chicken killed for supper has greater suffering than an embryo which dies.
I don't suppose that you would support someone going into rest homes and rehab centers and killing off all the coma patience and old, confused people, would you?
They aren't sentient and sapient either.
Suppose a theoretical scenario in which both are equally difficult and take the same amount of time to save and there is only time to save one or the other before the building burns down.
Which one do you save?
You don't pay attention, do you?
There IS no such situation. It's not possible.
For one thing, saving the embryos takes a whole lot more doing than saving the child, and it doesn't stop with putting the kid (or the embryos) on the sidewalk.
Like I said, I wish you guys would come up with an original argument. THIS one is very old, and artificial, and stupid.
and about as helpful to the conversation as the man on the tracks vs the train full of people one.
It is utterly useless to propose situations which do not, and cannot, exist in order to force an answer you prefer. It is especially useless to do so couched in personal insults, as you did.
As far as 'the value of human life' is concerned, I believe that the embryos and the child are precisely equal. One must make decisions like that for other reasons.
Whether YOU approve or not.
I would expend all my energy trying to save the five-year-old child. Trying to save the frozen embryos probably wouldn't even cross my mind.Of course I would save a baby, because a baby is a fully sentient human being. But answer me this. If a building was burning down and a 5 year old child was screaming in a room that happened to contain a box of 1000 viable frozen embryos that was about to go up in flames, would you save the child, or the embryos? If you would save the child, then you've acknowledged the obvious fact that humans who have been born are worth more than the unborn. If you would save the embryos instead, then congrats, you are a "pro-life" psychopath.