Clarifying Time Line - Conception to Birth - DRAW THE LINE OF LIFE

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CONCEPTION________________________________________________________BIRTH


Draw a vertical mark on the above time line showing where, in YOUR opinion, there is a person, a human to the right side of the mark you drew, and NOT a person, NOT a human to the left side of your mark.

Now explain to the very second how immediately left of your mark, it is NOT human, but a nanosecond later, it IS human, a real person.

This is an electrifying concept, this precise time you choose.

Medical doctors, scientists, define death as when a human heart stops beating permanently.
Is not the other side of this determination when a human STARTS beating permanently?

What would you say of a man who DEMANDED that his mistress abort their child? Wouldn't you be against it? Steve McQueen MADE Ali McGraw get an abortion when she wanted to have their baby. What a louse McQueen was.

The opposite of that situation is when a man begs his mistress to have their child, and instead she walks into the abortion clinic and has it murdered.
My brother was a security guard and he saw such men, crying, begging for their children. The fathers have no rights, whether they lose their child, or whether they pay child support for 18 years. No "CHOICE." Neither do 4 grandparents have any choice, any say-so.

Most crucial of all, the baby itself has no CHOICE. And it is NOT his mother's body that is being murdered. It is the baby's body. Unique DNA.

"Before you were conceived in the womb, I knew you." - The Holy Bible

MrWonderful said:

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CONCEPTION________________________________________________________BIRTH


Draw a vertical mark on the above time line showing where, in YOUR opinion, there is a person, a human to the right side of the mark you drew, and NOT a person, NOT a human to the left side of your mark.

Now explain to the very second how immediately left of your mark, it is NOT human, but a nanosecond later, it IS human, a real person.

This is an electrifying concept, this precise time you choose.

Medical doctors, scientists, define death as when a human heart stops beating permanently.
Is not the other side of this determination when a human STARTS beating permanently?

What would you say of a man who DEMANDED that his mistress abort their child? Wouldn't you be against it? Steve McQueen MADE Ali McGraw get an abortion when she wanted to have their baby. What a louse McQueen was.

The opposite of that situation is when a man begs his mistress to have their child, and instead she walks into the abortion clinic and has it murdered.
My brother was a security guard and he saw such men, crying, begging for their children. The fathers have no rights, whether they lose their child, or whether they pay child support for 18 years. No "CHOICE." Neither do 4 grandparents have any choice, any say-so.

Most crucial of all, the baby itself has no CHOICE. And it is NOT his mother's body that is being murdered. It is the baby's body. Unique DNA.

"Before you were conceived in the womb, I knew you." - The Holy Bible

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Irrelevant to my cosmology.

No true death. Ultimately no right and wrong. Just karma at some levels. Infinite lives with the purpose of experiencing everything possible in spacetime, good AND bad. The murderer and the murdered.

So no harm no foul in abortion.

A person? At birth.

Legally and ethically.


U.S. Code § 8 - “Person”, “human being”, “child”, and “individual” as including born-alive infant

(a) In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the words “person”, “human being”, “child”, and “individual”, shall include every infant member of the species homo sapiens who is born alive at any stage of development.

(b) As used in this section, the term “born alive”, with respect to a member of the species homo sapiens, means the complete expulsion or extraction from his or her mother of that member, at any stage of development, who after such expulsion or extraction breathes or has a beating heart, pulsation of the umbilical cord, or definite movement of voluntary muscles, regardless of whether the umbilical cord has been cut, and regardless of whether the expulsion or extraction occurs as a result of natural or induced labor, cesarean section, or induced abortion.

(c) Nothing in this section shall be construed to affirm, deny, expand, or contract any legal status or legal right applicable to any member of the species homo sapiens at any point prior to being “born alive” as defined in this section.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/1/8

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I think someone becomes a person at some point before birth, but certainly not at the point of conception. For the purpose of dictating policy, I would say personhood starts somewhere around the six month mark (i.e. at the end of six months). That's obviously a legal fiction; different individuals likely become persons at different times.

Now, what is personhood, exactly? I think it's really to do with the formation of a point of view, the formation of an "in here" that is distinct from "out there." When I stub my toe, I feel the pain. Others around me may wince and sympathize, but they're not feeling what I'm feeling. My pain is "in here," not "out there." Ditto all my other experiences and thoughts--they, too, are "in here," and not "out there." Presumably every other human body is carrying around that same "in here"/"out there" distinction.

It seems unlikely that a few cells have personhood, as so defined. On the other hand, it seems likely that an infant, even a premature infant, does have personhood. Since the drawing of this distinction does not come by degrees, it follows that there really is some moment at which personhood is sparked--one moment it does not exist, the next moment it does. As far as I know, there is no test that can be performed to find whether a person, rather than merely an aggregate of biological tissues, exists or not, so for now, all we can do is guess.

My guess is at around the six-month mark.

ashurbanipal said:

I think someone becomes a person at some point before birth, but certainly not at the point of conception. For the purpose of dictating policy, I would say personhood starts somewhere around the six month mark (i.e. at the end of six months). That's obviously a legal fiction; different individuals likely become persons at different times.

Now, what is personhood, exactly? I think it's really to do with the formation of a point of view, the formation of an "in here" that is distinct from "out there." When I stub my toe, I feel the pain. Others around me may wince and sympathize, but they're not feeling what I'm feeling. My pain is "in here," not "out there." Ditto all my other experiences and thoughts--they, too, are "in here," and not "out there." Presumably every other human body is carrying around that same "in here"/"out there" distinction.

It seems unlikely that a few cells have personhood, as so defined. On the other hand, it seems likely that an infant, even a premature infant, does have personhood. Since the drawing of this distinction does not come by degrees, it follows that there really is some moment at which personhood is sparked--one moment it does not exist, the next moment it does. As far as I know, there is no test that can be performed to find whether a person, rather than merely an aggregate of biological tissues, exists or not, so for now, all we can do is guess.

My guess is at around the six-month mark.

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To shorten your post, could one say "viability"?

MrWonderful said:

|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
CONCEPTION________________________________________________________BIRTH


Draw a vertical mark on the above time line showing where, in YOUR opinion, there is a person, a human to the right side of the mark you drew, and NOT a person, NOT a human to the left side of your mark.

Now explain to the very second how immediately left of your mark, it is NOT human, but a nanosecond later, it IS human, a real person.

This is an electrifying concept, this precise time you choose.

Medical doctors, scientists, define death as when a human heart stops beating permanently.
Is not the other side of this determination when a human STARTS beating permanently?

What would you say of a man who DEMANDED that his mistress abort their child? Wouldn't you be against it? Steve McQueen MADE Ali McGraw get an abortion when she wanted to have their baby. What a louse McQueen was.

The opposite of that situation is when a man begs his mistress to have their child, and instead she walks into the abortion clinic and has it murdered.
My brother was a security guard and he saw such men, crying, begging for their children. The fathers have no rights, whether they lose their child, or whether they pay child support for 18 years. No "CHOICE." Neither do 4 grandparents have any choice, any say-so.

Most crucial of all, the baby itself has no CHOICE. And it is NOT his mother's body that is being murdered. It is the baby's body. Unique DNA.

"Before you were conceived in the womb, I knew you." - The Holy Bible

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Your timeline is worthless along with your question. The timeline needs the weeks included, and human DANA does to equate to a Person, that does not take place until a thinking mind is formed, before that time it is only a potential person.Enough said.

MrWonderful said:

Draw a vertical mark on the above time line showing where, in YOUR opinion, there is a person,

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At live birth.

Now explain to the very second how immediately left of your mark, it is NOT human, but a nanosecond later, it IS human, a real person.

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I never said it isn't human. Of course it's human. It isn't a person.

What would you say of a man who DEMANDED that his mistress abort their child?

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He can demand all he wants, the decision is hers, not his.

The opposite of that situation is when a man begs his mistress to have their child, and instead she walks into the abortion clinic and has it murdered.

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Abortion isn't murder.

My brother was a security guard and he saw such men, crying, begging for their children.

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Bovine excrement.

The fathers have no rights, whether they lose their child, or whether they pay child support for 18 years. No "CHOICE." Neither do 4 grandparents have any choice, any say-so.

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When they are pregnant, they can have a say - over their own pregnancy.

Most crucial of all, the baby itself has no CHOICE.

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It doesn't get a choice about being born either. In fact, it is incapable of making and articulating a choice.

"Before you were conceived in the womb, I knew you." - The Holy Bible

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The Bible is only relevant to its adherents. Besides, that's to one specific person.

Conception obviously.

Dead, or non living cells, would not result in conception. Right?

MrWonderful said:

Now explain to the very second how immediately left of your mark, it is NOT human, but a nanosecond later, it IS human, a real person.

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Whenever the fetus could viably be transferred from the mother's womb with no more effort, pain or risk to the woman and survive without assistance from her.

MrWonderful said:

What would you say of a man who DEMANDED that his mistress abort their child? Wouldn't you be against it? \

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Of course. It's not the man's body, therefore, he has no say in the matter.

MrWonderful said:

My brother was a security guard and he saw such men, crying, begging for their children. The fathers have no rights, whether they lose their child,

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The fetus is exclusively the property of the woman so long as it is contained within her body.

MrWonderful said:

whether they pay child support for 18 years.

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Correct. The government can hold you financially responsible for your actions, but not physically responsible for them. It's no different than a car accident. If you cause a car accident the government can force you to pay for the medical bills of a person in the car you hit, but it cannot force you to donate blood in order to save them.

MrWonderful said:

Most crucial of all, the baby itself has no CHOICE.

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Nore should it have one. Nobody can choose to invade another person's body. If I can shoot a drunk that stumbles into my house by mistake then I can certainly kill a fetus trying to embed itself into my body and live there for 9 months.

A person becomes a person at birth.

My nephew became a person at 23 weeks gestation. Four months earlier in development than most people become people. It's mindbending that another potential person could be 24 weeks gestation and not yet be a person because their mother is undergoing a typical pregnancy and hasn't had a medical emergency which resulted in early delivery.

But that's how it is.

MrWonderful said:

|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
CONCEPTION________________________________________________________BIRTH


Draw a vertical mark on the above time line showing where, in YOUR opinion, there is a person, a human to the right side of the mark you drew, and NOT a person, NOT a human to the left side of your mark.

Now explain to the very second how immediately left of your mark, it is NOT human, but a nanosecond later, it IS human, a real person.

This is an electrifying concept, this precise time you choose.

Medical doctors, scientists, define death as when a human heart stops beating permanently.
Is not the other side of this determination when a human STARTS beating permanently?

What would you say of a man who DEMANDED that his mistress abort their child? Wouldn't you be against it? Steve McQueen MADE Ali McGraw get an abortion when she wanted to have their baby. What a louse McQueen was.

The opposite of that situation is when a man begs his mistress to have their child, and instead she walks into the abortion clinic and has it murdered.
My brother was a security guard and he saw such men, crying, begging for their children. The fathers have no rights, whether they lose their child, or whether they pay child support for 18 years. No "CHOICE." Neither do 4 grandparents have any choice, any say-so.

Most crucial of all, the baby itself has no CHOICE. And it is NOT his mother's body that is being murdered. It is the baby's body. Unique DNA.

"Before you were conceived in the womb, I knew you." - The Holy Bible

Click to expand...

You ask the wrong question. The question that needs to be answered is when does the fetus have rights and when do those rights supersede the woman's right to her own body.

MrWonderful said:

|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
CONCEPTION________________________________________________________BIRTH


Draw a vertical mark on the above time line showing where, in YOUR opinion, there is a person, a human to the right side of the mark you drew, and NOT a person, NOT a human to the left side of your mark.

Now explain to the very second how immediately left of your mark, it is NOT human, but a nanosecond later, it IS human, a real person.

This is an electrifying concept, this precise time you choose.

Medical doctors, scientists, define death as when a human heart stops beating permanently.
Is not the other side of this determination when a human STARTS beating permanently?

What would you say of a man who DEMANDED that his mistress abort their child? Wouldn't you be against it? Steve McQueen MADE Ali McGraw get an abortion when she wanted to have their baby. What a louse McQueen was.

The opposite of that situation is when a man begs his mistress to have their child, and instead she walks into the abortion clinic and has it murdered.
My brother was a security guard and he saw such men, crying, begging for their children. The fathers have no rights, whether they lose their child, or whether they pay child support for 18 years. No "CHOICE." Neither do 4 grandparents have any choice, any say-so.

Most crucial of all, the baby itself has no CHOICE. And it is NOT his mother's body that is being murdered. It is the baby's body. Unique DNA.

"Before you were conceived in the womb, I knew you." - The Holy Bible

Click to expand...

When men can go through the pain of childbirth, they can make that decision of how long she carries it. I am all for allowing abortion for any reason up to the start of the 2nd trimester....after that it is more complicated for me.

ClaraD said:

When men can go through the pain of childbirth, they can make that decision of how long she carries it. I am all for allowing abortion for any reason up to the start of the 2nd trimester....after that it is more complicated for me.

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While I agree with you on abortion that reasoning "when men can go through childbirth" has always been suspect since it assumes that to have an opinion on something one must experience it. Would you allow only murder victims to have an opinion on murder?

ClaraD said:

When men can go through the pain of childbirth, they can make that decision of how long she carries it. I am all for allowing abortion for any reason up to the start of the 2nd trimester....after that it is more complicated for me.

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I have a bit of a different take.

To me it is not a matter of "a man cannot understand....."

It is a matter of the individual person going through pregnancy or abortion is the only person who can make the decision.

I am a woman and I cannot decide for another woman how to feel about pregnancy or abortion....let alone the ramifications on her health!

Legally personhood is granted at birth. Morally it is more complicated. My personal view is a person doesn’t exist until a mind exists. It isn’t the stopping of a heart that makes murder a bad thing. Murder is bad because it extinguishes a mind. It isn’t the fact that you have human DNA or a fully functioning circulatory system that makes me care about your well being. It is the fact that you have a mind that makes me care about you.

No mind, no person as far as I am concerned. So when does a mind emerge? I doubt there is a definitive line and if there is it likely varies from fetus to fetus. A first term fetus certainly doesn’t have a mind yet. The brain structure for it doesn’t exist yet. My layperson interpretation of the data indicates a rudimentary mind begins to emerge during the 3rd trimester as dream cycles begin to happen at around 7 months. Dream cycles indicate the likelihood of a present mind, in my opinion. So that is when I consider a fetus philosophically a “person”. Of course abortions that happen at that stage are very rare and usually have serious medical reasons, in which case it is a triage measure at that point. Or when a fetus has developed without a functioning brain, in which case there is no mind to extinguish.

The problem is there is a limit to when you have made your choice. The vast majority of women know within the first 4 to 6 weeks of pregnancy, that they are pregnant. There are quite easy methods that work to 9 weeks. Im leaning to 14 weeks is enough time to decide...then the exception moves to medically needed abortion, like a fetus developing outside the uterus(happened to me) which is extremely life threatening. By 20 weeks only emergency intervention where child is born and they should provide life saving measures to all children born after 21 weeks. My 3rd child born in 1994 was born when I was 6 and 1/2 months pregnant. He is a grown man with no lasting effects

Dragonfly said:

To shorten your post, could one say "viability"?

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That was my initial intuition, but after thinking about it a while, I had to take a different view. As I think about the concept of personhood, it seems to have little to do with a body, just as such, but rather, the interior self that thinks, feels, muses, ponders, believes, intuits, judges, fears, regrets, loves, experiences, and so on. A great many people fear death, because they believe that death entails the annihilation of that interior self--given that view of death, the person dying is equivalent to the annihilation of the interior self. Murder is morally wrong not because it leaves a body non-functional, but because it removes from public interaction an interior self. We do not say that murder is horrible because we can no longer be present with the body of the victim (indeed, we clearly can still do that in most instances of murder), but because we can no longer interact with the interior self of the victim through their body.

Therefore, prior to the rise of personhood (which I think is just identical with the interior self) in a fetus, abortion is not morally wrong--or at least it cannot possibly rise to the level of murder, as its opponents claim. Abortion of a fetus with no interior self would not remove from the world something of value in the same way that murder removes from the world something of value. But after the rise of the interior self, abortion does indeed seem to be morally problematic. We once thought that the interior self doesn't arise until roughly eight months to a year after a baby was born, but we now think the interior self starts earlier--newborn babies seem to feel pain and recognize different sensations, so it is likely that the interior self arises sometime before birth. It'd be a little weird to discover that somehow the actual process of birth is what causes the interior self to arise, so if we exclude that possibility while acknowledging that when the baby pops out, it has an interior self, the only plausible possibility left is that the interior self arises prior to birth.

Now, if the question is how we should set policy around abortion, there is an obvious pragmatic benefit to including the criterion of viability outside the womb. If a fetus is viable outside the womb, and assuming there are no other complicating factors, it does seem downright mean-spirited to abort a fetus that could be taken out by c-section and given up for adoption. As I understand it, when a fetus gets to be developed enough to be viable outside the womb, a c-section isn't any more damaging than the procedures that have to be undergone for abortion at that stage. So it certainly seems like viability ought to play some role in whatever policies we have around abortion.

ClaraD said:

When men can go through the pain of childbirth, they can make that decision of how long she carries it. I am all for allowing abortion for any reason up to the start of the 2nd trimester....after that it is more complicated for me.

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I'll bet it is. Fathers have no voice whether their child is murdered or they have to pay child support for 18 years.

A definition

ashurbanipal said:

That was my initial intuition, but after thinking about it a while, I had to take a different view. As I think about the concept of personhood, it seems to have little to do with a body, just as such, but rather, the interior self that thinks, feels, muses, ponders, believes, intuits, judges, fears, regrets, loves, experiences, and so on. A great many people fear death, because they believe that death entails the annihilation of that interior self--given that view of death, the person dying is equivalent to the annihilation of the interior self. Murder is morally wrong not because it leaves a body non-functional, but because it removes from public interaction an interior self. We do not say that murder is horrible because we can no longer be present with the body of the victim (indeed, we clearly can still do that in most instances of murder), but because we can no longer interact with the interior self of the victim through their body.

…

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Roe v. Wade isn't about person in the sense of a personality, nor a human as opposed to an animal. It's about when the law recognizes the fetus as a legal person, which is upon birth as a viable baby. The Supreme Court didn't even hear much expert testimony on the point.

Re: A definition

southwest88 said:

Roe v. Wade isn't about person in the sense of a personality, nor a human as opposed to an animal. It's about when the law recognizes the fetus as a legal person, which is upon birth as a viable baby. The Supreme Court didn't even hear much expert testimony on the point.

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OK. So what? Why is that relevant to anything I wrote?

MrWonderful said:

I'll bet it is. Fathers have no voice whether their child is murdered or they have to pay child support for 18 years.

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They have a choice, its called a condom

Re: A definition

ashurbanipal said:

OK. So what? Why is that relevant to anything I wrote?

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If you want to replace Roe v. Wade with something else, you have to either convince the Supreme Court that something has changed & Roe needs to be revised. Or you have to convince Congress to pass legislation overruling Roe. Either one is a tough path.

ClaraD said:

The problem is there is a limit to when you have made your choice. The vast majority of women know within the first 4 to 6 weeks of pregnancy, that they are pregnant. There are quite easy methods that work to 9 weeks. Im leaning to 14 weeks is enough time to decide...then the exception moves to medically needed abortion, like a fetus developing outside the uterus(happened to me) which is extremely life threatening. By 20 weeks only emergency intervention where child is born and they should provide life saving measures to all children born after 21 weeks. My 3rd child born in 1994 was born when I was 6 and 1/2 months pregnant. He is a grown man with no lasting effects

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When my brother's son was born at 23 weeks, they had to go to a 2nd hospital because the first one they went to didn't start life saving measures until 24 weeks. So they quickly found one which started a week earlier.

After many scares, many times they were told to prepare for the worst, his son is now healthy and happy. His only apparent birth-related problem is that he is going blind, and he has much support in dealing with that.

I asked my brother if his experience with a micro-premie affected his feelings about abortion of fetuses which were 23 or more weeks old, and he said that yes, it did affect his feelings. It made him all the more firm on it being a personal choice which shouldn't be legislated. After the strains his family experienced he would never fault someone who made a decision to terminate later than that. He knew what kind of struggling would go into that decision.



^^ that's my long way of saying that I'm ambivalent about the statement "they should provide life saving measures to all children born after 21 weeks". We're certainly not at a technological place where that should be required. We don't even have a record of a 21-week baby ever surviving. 21 weeks 4 days is the earliest. I can understand a hospital not even making it an option until the baby is a little older than that.

Amelia said:

When my brother's son was born at 23 weeks, they had to go to a 2nd hospital because the first one they went to didn't start life saving measures until 24 weeks. So they quickly found one which started a week earlier.

After many scares, many times they were told to prepare for the worst, his son is now healthy and happy. His only apparent birth-related problem is that he is going blind, and he has much support in dealing with that.

I asked my brother if his experience with a micro-premie affected his feelings about abortion of fetuses which were 23 or more weeks old, and he said that yes, it did affect his feelings. It made him all the more firm on it being a personal choice which shouldn't be legislated. After the strains his family experienced he would never fault someone who made a decision to terminate later than that. He knew what kind of struggling would go into that decision.



^^ that's my long way of saying that I'm ambivalent about the statement "they should provide life saving measures to all children born after 21 weeks". We're certainly not at a technological place where that should be required. We don't even have a record of a 21-week baby ever surviving. 21 weeks 4 days is the earliest. I can understand a hospital not even making it an option until the baby is a little older than that.

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Oh, I dont understand a hospital not making it an option.

ClaraD said:

Oh, I dont understand a hospital not making it an option.

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If the baby is too small, the hospital may feel it is their duty to be realistic with the parents, and merciful to the child.

Parents might want any measures taken no matter how young the child is, and hospitals might feel it's their duty to save the child from a procedure which has almost no chance of working and will be traumatic for the child.

And of course some hospitals don't even have a NICU.



And no baby of a mere 21-week gestation is known to have survived.