When does human life begin?
This will always be a matter of opinion... conception? Birth? I dunno? I put it somewhere in between... probably around the beginning of the second trimester. Come on... once you know know you're pregnant you need to decide. Waiting to the last minute to have an abortion is not acceptable IMO. 1
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youre not human until youre capable of breathing air like the rest of us. So what about people who have lung issues and depend on technology in order to breath? The question isn't when the thing becomes a human; thats a silly and, quite frankly, absurd thing to ask. The question is when the thing becomes a person. 1
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"Life" begins at conception. There's no question a fertilized egg is a living cell. However by tacking on the word "human" it becomes a more difficult question to answer. The issue lies in our societies inability to decide when social birth occurs. You see every person (anthropologically speaking) has 2 births and 2 deaths. Your real birth and death, and social birth and social death. Social birth is when you're considered a human being/person by your society and social death is when you're no longer considered a human being/person. These things are subjective and reflect the natures of each society. For example, many tribes in Africa have a social birth set for months and even years after a child is born. This is because of the high infant mortality rate there. Because of it the societies had to adapt, does it make sense to get attached to infants that have such a high chance of dying? No. As such they recognize this late social birth to avoid that depression. Also these societies have early social deaths. The elderly eventually become a burden to the tribe and are left to die and some even recognize this and walk into the wild to die. This, again, is for the betterment of the tribe that would otherwise have to deal with the needs of that person who can't provide anything for the tribe. Now back to the 1st world or more specifically the US. The reason abortion, and this "human life" question is such a tricky thing is that we have no idea when our social birth and death ages are. We have yet to establish them because of how young a society we are. It appears that our social death age is quite high as we can easily care for most elderly up until they die. However we still don't have an exact social birth. Is a fetus a human being in our society? Is it only at 20 weeks? Only when the heart forms? Only when it can feel pain? Only after its outside the mom? We haven't established this so there is no clear definitive answer and it is all up to opinion. What I see as the only solution to this debate is scientific evidence of certain milestones such as when it feels pain, when an organ forms, when it can think, ect. And one of these milestones ought to be the point at which we say "this is now a human being/person and cannot be aborted". But this is no easy task and is ultimately up to the moral consensus of the majority. |