re: #93 danarchy

I have heard this before. Hypothetically speaking, what if medical science progressed to a point where they created an artificial womb that could do most of the gestation outside the body? Or even if they just got to a point where a premature baby could survive earlier and earlier, say 16 weeks.

As far as I am concerned, until it develops a brain, it should not be considered an individual.

Humans have difficulty with how to think about processes, rather than events, so they focus on events, even turning processes INTO events for easier understanding.

Fertilization, for example, is a process, not an event. It starts with two haploid cells and ends with one diploid cell, but it’s not instantaneous. No bright flash of light, indicating a watershed event.

That one diploid cell may undergo a long process of division, growth, differentiation, development. Or not. Or it might get only part of the way and stop, and die. But if it does, what starts out as ‘not a baby’ BECOMES ‘a baby’. But there’s no one watershed event at which ‘not a baby’ becomes ‘a baby’.

If you’re a binary thinker, you’re stuck with fertilization as your watershed moment, and you’re stuck defending the concept that a single diploid cell is equivalent to a living, breathing, already-born baby.