I can see what you mean.
But it seems just as immoral to me to abort a 9+ week old fetus, as it would be to kill a newborn baby.
This is an emotional argument on your part. If it's the basis for your opinion on abortion, well that's your business, but don't expect it to be agreed to by anyone who doesn't share your emotional gut reaction.
Arguably, both are just as aware and self-conscious.
I think this is incorrect. Arguably, the
capacity for awareness and consciousness occurs over time, but just at birth, major changes in the fetus/baby take place: before birth, the fetus' neurological function is so suppressed that it doesn't have a breathing reflex and its heartbeat is just a "twitch" that's not actually capable of circulating blood. With the just-born baby's first breath, major changes take place: the breathing reflex "kicks on", the heart starts pumping at full pressure, and the baby "wakes up", both physically and mentally.
But at the same time, it makes no sense to me to liken masturbation to mass murder.
In a similar way, it makes no sense to equate a 9-week fetus with a newborn infant. Why is it that you're right and I'm wrong?
So the human life must manifest at some point between conception and development.
Human life is present in the fetus, just as human life was present in the separate sperm and egg.
The obvious difference between a gamete and an embryo is the amount of genetic material each individually contain - and the change in genetic material occurs at conception.
So an individual human life must begin at conception.
But here's the thing: what is it about this change that you think imparts value into the embryo that wasn't there when the sperm and egg were separate?
I
get the religious argument. When someone tells me that the embryo receives its "soul" or the like at the moment of conception, fair enough: I understand how, if this were true, this would represent a reason to value an embryo or fetus as a person. I also understand that there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that we have a "soul", let alone that our bodies receive it at conception.
What I don't get is the seemingly non-religious argument you're putting forward. There's nothing about the combination of DNA that implies we should change how we value an unfertilized egg or an embryo. I think your argument really breaks down like this:
- fetal development is a long, continuous process where it's difficult to pinpoint specific events of radical change, except at the two extreme ends.
- you've arbitrarily (or maybe emotionally) decided that the one extreme end, birth, is excluded from being the point at which the fetus becomes a "person" (or "a life").
- you recognize that it's very difficult to identify a single point along the continuum of fetal development where
that specific point (and not some point just before or just after as well) could be justified as
the point where a "person" (or "a life") begins. Therefore, you exclude the idea that the transition to "personhood" occurs during fetal development... not because you've shown that it doesn't happen, but you've decided it would be too difficult to try.
- the only point left is conception, so it's your answer by default... but without any consideration of whether it's a reasonable answer to the question of when "personhood" begins.
I think that it would be very difficult to make a case for any particular point in the process of conception, development and birth that would be "the" point at which "a life" begins. What I think is much more reasonable is reject the black-and-white concepts like "personhood" or "a life"/"not a life" as rather useless and instead to believe that the
value of the fetus increases continually over the course of the pregnancy.
