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The fetus could be miscarried. It could be a stillborn

So, it would be alright to kill it after it was born. After all, it could have gotten sick and died anyways.

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I think that since it will be a human life, it doesn't matter if it technically a life "yet". It will be some day

If you go into the whole "It could be an human one day" argument, you then need to think of each sperm and each egg which, infact, could one day be a person.

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Originally posted by Kate127:
I think that since it will be a human life, it doesn't matter if it technically a life "yet". It will be some day.

A seed will one day grow to be a tree. Is cutting open a seed equivalent to cutting down a giant redwood?

This was addressed earlier, but still.

Even that is not concrete. The fetus could be miscarried. It could be a stillborn. Any number of things could happen to prevent it from being born alive. It most likely will be born healthy, but that's not guaranteed.

I think that since it will be a human life, it doesn't matter if it technically a life "yet". It will be some day.

I am cold, bitter, and feel like puking for some unknown reason that is probably either too much caffiene or that weird ass virus.

But the title of this thread still made me laugh.

"Fetal Personhood"

Ah, excellent.

On to something relevant:
We need to stop thinking in dichotomies: we have what Richard Dawkins calls "discontinuous minds". Life is not full of clear, happy lines and a priori definitions of good and bad. The ethics surrounding abortion will always be foggy for some of us, and there is nothing we can do about that. The best thing we will probably ever get is an approximate idea of what is and is not a "person".

Human life isn't hard to define. It's a continuous cycle, just like with other organisms. We don't think of our haploid gamete phase as part of that life cycle, forcing us to find out where it begins. We're still looking for that mythological "quickening", when a soul enters a mass of replicating soma, but we'll never find it.

Argument by analogy is weak and irrelevant. We're not going to solve an ethical issue by talking about butterflies and woolens.

We also need to either drop the word "person", which is clearly a subjective, arbitrary term with no reality-based definition. Those kind of terms complicate things.

Other than criticizing semantics, I can't think of anything else to contribute. Someone clarify exactly what we're attempting to determine and I'll throw in my opinion.

Since clpo already covered your first two questions cz, here are the rest.

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Also is a caterpillar any less a butterfly before the cocoon?

Yes. A caterpillar is a caterpillar. Can caterpillars fly before the cocoon?

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what about a seed any less a plant?

An apple seed can't produce me an apple, but the full blown apple tree could.

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Is a shirt any more than wool?

Wool isn't a shirt untill the wool has been spun, woven, and then sewn into a shirt.

Yes to all of those, cz.

A single cancerous cell poses negligible danger. If detected, it can easily be destroyed. Once that cell reproduces, however, the problem gets serious. A tumor can interfere with important physical processes and push vital organs out of their places. And depending on where it is, it may be impossible to remove.

HIV is not a disease. It is merely a virus that, when it attaches to a healthy cell, can cause AIDS. And AIDS is only deadly when many cells are affected.

I won't bother nitpicking with the others, but I think you get my point. In my eyes, a fetus is on the same level as other animals. Humans are self-aware. Fetuses have yet to be shown that they are self-aware. They may move around, they may feel pain, and they will react to stimuli...but then again, so do mice. Fetuses may be more than simply a clump of cells, but they're nothing special until they've been born.

But that's just my opinion.

It's a terrible comparison but is a cancerous cell any less cancer when it's just one cell? is it only cancer when it becomes a huge tumor? what about HIV? is it only a disease or illness when it's full blown or when it's one cell? Also is a caterpillar any less a butterfly before the cocoon? what about a seed any less a plant? Is a shirt any more than wool?

Before the baby is fully develpoed, all it is abunch of cells. and i think (but i not sure) that some doctors sent the cells to scientists.
good bye

Because I think no matter how much information you pull about about when a baby is really a person, there are always those who believe other wise, especially those who have been pregnant before who feel as though they can feel another life growing inside of them. When you have an experience like that then it'll be hard to convince those people that hey your baby isn't even a person until such and such week. I mean if you go get a sonogram and see your baby's hear beating, can you still say its not a person? If you know that it's in there and when you get and abortion it will no longer be, won't you still feel grief as though you lost someone close to you? I think there so much controversy about because there are so many outlooks on it. Two people can have the same situation, and one could have an abortion and the other could keep the baby, and both could say that it was the best thing that ever happened to them. In a lot of ways the outlook on abortions isn't as cut and dry as we would like it to be.