Honestly, I have never heard this before.
Surely you're familiar with the notion of birth. You know, the thing that happens when a baby emerges from its incubator, breathes, then cries expressing the jolt? Birth is the logical and traditional point of demarcation. I just expressed it in terms of the immediate physical act, breathing.
Is there any science to back this up?
Science? What kind of science would speak to this? Abortion is a moral issue and, in some cultures that don't recognize the moral agency (liberty) of all its citizens, a legal issue. The science is pretty simple. There are three states of a existence: pending, out in the world doing one's thing, and dead. The science is not complicated and there's nothing new here. There may be a bit of fuzziness around the immediate thresholds such as brain dead vs dead dead but, while informed by science, they aren't scientific ones.
I can, OTOH, argue the question of personhood from several pertinent perspectives.
There's tradition as displayed in the culture's traditional processes. There's tradition as displayed in a culture's traditional language usage. And then there's the no-harm-no-foul moral argument. There may be more arguments for personhood beginning at birth but I have not felt the need to think up more to pile onto what is already compelling.
Plus, I have not yet heard any argument for living human cells being sufficient to determine personhood. All I've heard is raw belief. |
