re: #366 wrenchwench

So, embryos never, fetuses at some point?

There are three possible situations:

1. A fetus is never a person. It becomes a person upon birth.

2. A fetus is a person sometime before birth.

3. A baby is not a person for some time after birth.

Position 1 is untenable (if we are talking about actual personhood, not legal simplifications, which change from law to law): there is nothing going on in the brain of the fetus that suddenly makes it into a person during birth.

Positions 2 and 3 are both logically tenable, though they have different practical consequences in certain cases (e.g. punishment for infanticide).