darth_ender said:
Bingowings said:
Of course a fetus is less than a person it's only formative stimulus has been a swooshing noise and the vague feeling of being warm and wet.
If the parents have invested hopes and aspirations into the progress of the pregnancy it's an important wiggly bundle of kicking flesh to them. If you believe, without any evidence it has a magic ghost put inside by an invisible benefactor it's probably sacred, but a person?
People only become people when they can demonstrate a definable persona.
The person thing starts sort of around the toddler stage when the child stops acting like a screaming muscle and starts acting more like a puppy.
Try asking a baby if it likes yo-yos. If you get an answer more meaningful than spit bubbles, screams, involuntary giggles or flatulence you may be on to something.
You swim in very murky moral waters with an attitude like this. If the primary value to a human being is contingent on the invested hopes and aspirations others have placed in that person, such arguments could be used to argue in favor of slavery, of murder, of genocide. Human value is either innate or it is not. I choose innateness.
To complicate your argument, you say that a person starts sort of around the toddler stage. While I find this to be a bunch of bunk, since children are learning language skills before they are even born, it is true that self-awareness forms later. This could be useful reading.
http://psychology.emory.edu/cognition/rochat/Five%20levels%20.pdf
So according to your argument, a child could still be "aborted" post delivery, up to toddler stage. Someone who reads the article could justify abortion up to 5 years old.
Many of my patients have no hopes inested in them, no aspirations. I was taking care of a time consuming hospice patient yesterday. His can be very confused at times, and he receives large doses of pain medication. He will die on his own soon. But he has also expressed a desire to live. Should the state decide that we should remove all life-saving measures because it is a waste of resources? Should his family look at him as a 100 kg of kicking flesh because he has no future?
When "full-fledged" persons presume to define the personhood of others, historically we have found ourselves amidst the most horrendous atrocities.
hey, why stop at removing life-saving measures? Just fill him full of arsenic. Of course make sure he can't tell you whether or not he likes yo-yos first. By Bingo's asinine logic, it should be perfect legal for me to walk into a hospital and shoot and kill a bunch of newborns. After they are not yet toddlers and can't tell me whether or not they like yo-yos, so I guess they are not people so killing them is not murder!