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JWeinCom on 27 October 2016
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Final-Fan said:
JWeinCom said:

There is a different between human life and a person.  

I stand corrected; sundin13 isn't a majority even if he meets the stricter criterion (his post isn't explicit). 

While I have your attention, I'd like to ask you about your statement, "We also need to have some sort of restriction as to when a fetus can be aborted, because it obviously doesn't suddenly switch alive the moment it is born.  But, the best we can do is lines in the sand.  We're never going to have a magican moment when a ball a cells qualifies as a human.  So, we leave the decisions in the gray area to the people directly involved in any case, particularly the woman who will be carrying the child."

How gray is this gray area you're talking about?  Your wording suggests that we let women get abortions when we aren't even confident we aren't killing people, just so long as we aren't confident we ARE killing people.  Would you like to clarify or elaborate 

Well, up to 14 days, we still don't know if we're talking about one potential person or multiple potential persons.  Twinning can still occur at this stage.  At 8 weeks, the fetus has rudimentary, but not yet functional, organs.  At about 4 months the fetus' nervous system is developed enough to react to stimuli without brain activity, similar to a venus fly trap.  At week 20, the thalamus is formed, so the basics of the brain are in place.  Actual brain waves and sustained brain activity can't be detected until, generally, 24 weeks.  It is generally agreed that the fetus can not feel pain until this point.

I don't think braindead people can be considered alive, so I would say that anything before this point isn't all that gray.  I don't necessarily think that a functioning brain equates to being a person, but it seems like the best indicator we have, so I'd go with that.  The gray area is basically between that second and third trimester, between weeks 20 and 28.  That's the point where I would personally struggle if I were a woman.  

But, even if we could confirm that the fetus is alive at that point, I'm still not sure about whether or not abortion to be illegal.  Maybe immoral, but not necessarily illegal.  There is a difference between killing and removing from the womb, and it's an important legal distinction.

I'm sure that sounds sickening, cause it did the first time I heard it as well.  But, in a debate I saw, someone raised a good point.  At no stage of development is it ever assumed that a person has the right to use the body of another person.  Even if the fetus is what we would call alive, that doesn't mean it has the right to use its mothers body.

Obviously, without the mother's body it will die.  However, there are other similar situations.  Suppose an 7 year old child needs a kidney to live, and its mother is the only match available.  I, as well as most people, would consider the mother monstrous if she didn't consent, but should she be legally required to?  Or, suppose it wasn't a kidney, but merely a blood transfusion.  In this case, where the mother would most likely not suffer in the long term, it would be even more monstrous to not consent.  But, if the mother doesn't, should the government be able to forcibly drain her blood?

Which raises the question that if an 7 year old doesn't have the right to use its mothers body without her consent, should a seven month old have that right?  It's not something I personally like, but I can't think of an argument that a woman should be forced to keep a fetus inside of her body.

It gets grayer when you add in other factors.  Suppose you say that once the brain is fully developed at 24 weeks, and that makes the fetus officially alive.  What do we do in the case of a pregnancy that could be carried to term, but would pose a higher than normal risk to the mother's life (any live birth has a far higher risk of death than abortion)?  Once we legally claim that a fetus is alive at a certain point how can we make ANY exception at ANY point after that?  There is no situation in which we are able to kill a child to save its mother.  So, regardless of rape or potential harm to the mother, how can you make an exception?  If you count late term abortion as murder, I don't know how you get around that problem.

So, there's your gray area.  Biological and legal.