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An egg has the potential to be human but isn't afforded legal right to fertilization so it can reach its potential. A newborn babe on the other hand has a righ

An egg has the potential to be human but isn't afforded legal right to fertilization so it can reach its potential. A newborn babe on the other hand has a rights. That I hope we can agree on. Therefore there must be some point in time in which the babe acquires rights it didn't possess. To me the strongest contender for the crossover point is brain development in the third trimester. Do you have a different time in mind? Why?

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
I could go with brain development (maybe - see the next paragraph). I'll even give you an additional argument for it. I'm an organ donor. If something happens to me, a bunch of doctors have to decide whether I'm alive or dead. If I'm dead, feel free to donate my organs. But if I'm alive, then taking my heart out is murder. How do they decide? If I understand correctly, it's by brain activity. If my brain has stopped, and isn't going to start again, then whatever I am, I'm gone, and feel free to take the spare parts. But you said "brain development", not brain activity. Do you have some developmental milestone in mind? If so, what? My standard hinges on electrical activity in the brain, which is there by the 24th week - that is, the second trimester. (And maybe earlier - detecting brain activity isn't as simple as slapping EEG electrodes on the skull, when the skull is inside the womb.) I would argue for that, rather than for a particular developmental milestone. Other possible milestones: The earliest that a child has survived being born prematurely. (22 weeks currently, I think.) If at that stage of development it has full human rights because it had the misfortune to be born prematurely, why shouldn't it have those rights if it wasn't born prematurely? Or, first heartbeat. (The heartbeat used to be the deciding line on the death side, before the brain was.) Or, fertilization or implantation. (I agree with you about the egg.) It will become possible to build an artificial womb that will take a fertilized egg and produce a baby in nine months. Does that change the boundaries for you at all? (Via my "premature birth" argument, does it change the boundaries if we can take an earlier, non-viable premature birth, stick it in the artificial womb, and have it survive?) This last position loops back to my argument about the organ donor. The question was whether the brain had stopped, and wasn't going to start up again. Well, in the case of the fetus, it will start up if you just don't kill it. (Whereas the egg, by itself, will just die in 7 or 8 days.) The fetus is "default alive"; the egg is "default dead". To me, that makes abortion different from birth control.
- michaelmrose 4y ago
  Viability is a ridiculous standard. It makes no difference when an artificial womb nobody is offering might in theory be able to support a fetus if we are actually asking if one ought to make a woman offer her body. It's a worthless counterfactual related in no meaningful way to reality. Life is equally worthless mold is alive, the egg is alive, sperm is alive. The term "default alive" literally means less than nothing. It's just gluing words together in a way that has no meaning. The baby's brain will triple in size during the third trimester including almost all of the development of the cerebral cortex features that are essential to being human or even being a mouse. It goes from something that as is is functionality incapable of being considered asleep or awake that doesn't posses the ability to drive even a mouse's experience to something that could aptly be said to be a sleeping human brain during this time. This is definitively when potential becomes reality. The standard established by roe of between 24-28 weeks being set before this actuality is safe standard to balance rights of baby and mom to ensure we don't enslave actual humans to the needs of potential ones.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  Do you eat meat?
- defrost 4y ago
  > This last position loops back to ... This is an interesting line of argument. The twist here is that a fetus is "default alive" provided resources are expended to keep it that way. Consider: > The earliest that a child has survived being born prematurely. (22 weeks currently, I think.) as a point at which a host might say "I don't wish to support this parasite that I have no interest in any longer" and transfers a fetus to an artifical womb. Murder? That seems unlikely. But is the fetus truly "default alive"? If the power goes out will it survive? Surely it requires external support much as various patients require life support but are otherwise not viable. Things are rarely clearcut and this point at least is still within the grey of a Sorites paradox.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    Fair points. On the other hand, a full-term newborn isn't fully "default alive" either - if the parents don't expend resources on it, it dies. (And then we arrest the parents for neglect.) So... yeah. "Things are rarely clearcut", as someone said recently :-)

AnimalMuppet 4y ago

I could go with brain development (maybe - see the next paragraph). I'll even give you an additional argument for it. I'm an organ donor. If something happens to me, a bunch of doctors have to decide whether I'm alive or dead. If I'm dead, feel free to donate my organs. But if I'm alive, then taking my heart out is murder. How do they decide? If I understand correctly, it's by brain activity. If my brain has stopped, and isn't going to start again, then whatever I am, I'm gone, and feel free to take the spare parts. But you said "brain development", not brain activity. Do you have some developmental milestone in mind? If so, what? My standard hinges on electrical activity in the brain, which is there by the 24th week - that is, the second trimester. (And maybe earlier - detecting brain activity isn't as simple as slapping EEG electrodes on the skull, when the skull is inside the womb.) I would argue for that, rather than for a particular developmental milestone. Other possible milestones: The earliest that a child has survived being born prematurely. (22 weeks currently, I think.) If at that stage of development it has full human rights because it had the misfortune to be born prematurely, why shouldn't it have those rights if it wasn't born prematurely? Or, first heartbeat. (The heartbeat used to be the deciding line on the death side, before the brain was.) Or, fertilization or implantation. (I agree with you about the egg.) It will become possible to build an artificial womb that will take a fertilized egg and produce a baby in nine months. Does that change the boundaries for you at all? (Via my "premature birth" argument, does it change the boundaries if we can take an earlier, non-viable premature birth, stick it in the artificial womb, and have it survive?) This last position loops back to my argument about the organ donor. The question was whether the brain had stopped, and wasn't going to start up again. Well, in the case of the fetus, it will start up if you just don't kill it. (Whereas the egg, by itself, will just die in 7 or 8 days.) The fetus is "default alive"; the egg is "default dead". To me, that makes abortion different from birth control.

michaelmrose 4y ago
Viability is a ridiculous standard. It makes no difference when an artificial womb nobody is offering might in theory be able to support a fetus if we are actually asking if one ought to make a woman offer her body. It's a worthless counterfactual related in no meaningful way to reality. Life is equally worthless mold is alive, the egg is alive, sperm is alive. The term "default alive" literally means less than nothing. It's just gluing words together in a way that has no meaning. The baby's brain will triple in size during the third trimester including almost all of the development of the cerebral cortex features that are essential to being human or even being a mouse. It goes from something that as is is functionality incapable of being considered asleep or awake that doesn't posses the ability to drive even a mouse's experience to something that could aptly be said to be a sleeping human brain during this time. This is definitively when potential becomes reality. The standard established by roe of between 24-28 weeks being set before this actuality is safe standard to balance rights of baby and mom to ensure we don't enslave actual humans to the needs of potential ones.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Do you eat meat?
defrost 4y ago
> This last position loops back to ... This is an interesting line of argument. The twist here is that a fetus is "default alive" provided resources are expended to keep it that way. Consider: > The earliest that a child has survived being born prematurely. (22 weeks currently, I think.) as a point at which a host might say "I don't wish to support this parasite that I have no interest in any longer" and transfers a fetus to an artifical womb. Murder? That seems unlikely. But is the fetus truly "default alive"? If the power goes out will it survive? Surely it requires external support much as various patients require life support but are otherwise not viable. Things are rarely clearcut and this point at least is still within the grey of a Sorites paradox.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Fair points. On the other hand, a full-term newborn isn't fully "default alive" either - if the parents don't expend resources on it, it dies. (And then we arrest the parents for neglect.) So... yeah. "Things are rarely clearcut", as someone said recently :-)