Posted By crates on March 9, 2009

I’m sure that most people have thought about this question at one time or another.  The answer that a person arrives at will determine his attitude towards various practices in our society.

Does a person become a person at fertilization of the egg?  We know that the oocyte is alive and that the spermatozoan is alive, but neither of course has the ability to become a person before the egg is actually fertilized and the two nuclei fuse to become a cell that has the potential to develop into a fully formed person.

If you believe in a soul, then when is this imparted to the developing ball of cells?  Does this occur at fertilization?  Does it occur at birth?  Or is it a becoming, a gradual process that occurs as the fetus develops?  If you don’t believe in a soul then substitute “person” instead.  When does a person come into being?  It gets even  more complicated when you consider chimerism, when two plus fetuses fuse to form one!  I have written about this here.

I often think of these questions when I read about the arguments for and against abortion.  Abortion opponents have it relatively easy.  They simply declare that a person begins at fertilization and are done with it.

Abortion advocates have a harder time it seems to me.  However, I assume that the abortion advocates have reached some sort of conclusion in their own minds in regards to these questions.  Since I’m sure that nobody advocates murder, then it follows that the advocates of abortion must not believe that a fertilized egg is a person.  In fact, I often hear somebody making the statement that the very early fetus is simply a lump of undifferentiated tissue, as if this proves that it couldn’t possibility be a person.  Of course any student of Embryology knows that from almost the very beginning there are intricate structures forming in the ball of cells–including a brain and heart, etc.

Since such people must not believe that an early fetus is a human, then I always wonder just when they believe a fetus becomes a person.  It is a curious problem and the ramifications are numerous. Some say that a baby really isn’t a person until it can live on its own.  However, in some cases this would mean the teenage years at least. Others say that a baby is not really a person until it has the full physical capacities of a person–until it has fully developed in other words.

I especially think about this when I read about late term abortions.  I have even heard of the fetus being “terminated” by the attending physician before it actually emerges from the birth canal.  Advocates of this practice seem to promulgate the idea that the baby isn’t a real person until it is born. Now this idea does simplify things.  It allows women “freedom of choice” and frees them from any potential guilt.  In other words it is acceptable to dispose of the baby as long as it occurs before the actual birth.  This is a nice convenient stance, almost as simple as the abortion opponent’s claim that fertilization is the beginning of the person.

However, this belief raises even more questions in my mind.  If a baby only becomes a person when it is born, then it seems a mite arbitrary in my opinion.  The only difference that I can see between the baby in the birth canal just before birth and the baby right after birth is location.

Also, just what constitutes full development in a baby?  Some used to say that the physical development of the brain didn’t cease until the baby was several years old.  However, more recent studies have  suggested that brain development doesn’t reach its full potential until twenty or thirty years old.   From such studies, some could make the argument that a person is NOT a person until twenty or thirty years of age.  This simplifies the question immensely!

Think about this a moment.  If a person is not a person until full brain maturity is reached, then we can determine with more confidence the time that personhood is reached and do away with all the previous uncertainty.

Now we can, with a clear conscience, throw our young people into the maelstrom of war.  They aren’t really people yet, so sacrificing them in this manner is perfectly excusable.  Also infanticide, or the disposing of babies after birth is now acceptable.  Newborn babies clearly aren’t people based upon brain maturity.  Capital punishment advocates now have an overwhelming argument supporting their stance if the accused is less than twenty years of age.  And so on and so on…I’m sure there are many other areas that will be impacted by this idea.

Categories: nature
Tags: abortion, Add new tag, brain development, ethics, genetic drift, nature, personhood