The line typically does not get drawn at birth. The legal cutoff in most countries that allow abortion is around 20 weeks after conception (it varies by a few weeks depending on the country). Before then women are free to get elective abortions and many do, after that abortions are only permitted in special circumstances and are very rare. Wikipedia has a graph of abortion timing in the United States and other relevant information, including a poll showing that most Americans think that first trimester abortions should be legal and third trimester abortions should be illegal.
An early stage embryo/fetus does not have a functioning brain and is not viable outside the womb. It seems like it could be reasonable to draw the line during pregnancy, before either of those two things have happened. Since brain development and viability are gradual processes, people could argue for drawing the line at a later part of the process, so a cutoff during the first half of a pregnancy could be seen as a relatively safe, conservative choice.
Seconded. Not only does the law support this, but every argument I’ve ever come across has been about whether the cell-group(? I can’t think of a neutral term that does sound dumb) should be considered a person once it has a full set of human DNA or if it isn’t considered a person until it has a central nervous system. The last time I even heard of a serious abortion-rights argument hinging on Birth rather than Neural Development was decades before I was born. While the original post is interesting, I don’t understand it’s fixation on birth.
The line typically does not get drawn at birth. The legal cutoff in most countries that allow abortion is around 20 weeks after conception (it varies by a few weeks depending on the country). Before then women are free to get elective abortions and many do, after that abortions are only permitted in special circumstances and are very rare. Wikipedia has a graph of abortion timing in the United States and other relevant information, including a poll showing that most Americans think that first trimester abortions should be legal and third trimester abortions should be illegal.
An early stage embryo/fetus does not have a functioning brain and is not viable outside the womb. It seems like it could be reasonable to draw the line during pregnancy, before either of those two things have happened. Since brain development and viability are gradual processes, people could argue for drawing the line at a later part of the process, so a cutoff during the first half of a pregnancy could be seen as a relatively safe, conservative choice.
Seconded. Not only does the law support this, but every argument I’ve ever come across has been about whether the cell-group(? I can’t think of a neutral term that does sound dumb) should be considered a person once it has a full set of human DNA or if it isn’t considered a person until it has a central nervous system. The last time I even heard of a serious abortion-rights argument hinging on Birth rather than Neural Development was decades before I was born. While the original post is interesting, I don’t understand it’s fixation on birth.