[Vision2020] The Fetus is Not a Baby and is not a Person (Was Sali . . .)

[Nick Gier]

Good Morning Visionaries:

I'm continually amazed at those Visionaries who still think they can 
have a dialogue with Donovan Arnold, but let me just weigh in, once 
again, on the issue of abortion.  If you want the entire argument you 
should go to www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/abortion.htm.

If one studies human physiology or even looks up things up in a 
dictionary, there are distinct and proper terms for the development 
of the human species from the fertilization of the egg--it is then 
called a conceptus--to its implantation in the womb--it is then an 
embryo--and then after that it becomes a fetus.  It is not a baby 
until it is born.

On this point, I like to quote a famous Roman Catholic philosopher: 
"To admit that the human fetus receives the intellectual soul from 
the moment of its conception,when matter is in no way ready for it, 
sounds to me like a philosophical absurdity. It is as absurd as to 
call a fertilized ovum a baby." (Jacques Maritain)  Maritain is 
simply following Thomas Aquinas, declared infallible by Pope Pius IX, 
who argued, following Aristotle and in line with fetal physiology, 
that the fetus does not have a significant mental live until the 
third trimester.

As I have posted many times on this list, our moral, legal, and 
religious tradition has not consistently called a human fetus a moral 
and legal person until late in pregnancy.  This means that the Roe v. 
Wade is the traditional, and therefore conservative, position on 
abortion.  Roman Catholic philosophers who attempted to use genetic 
theory to wrongly fuse genetic identity with personal identity were 
just confused liberals.

The other distinction that needs to be made is between the biological 
category of being a member of the human species and the moral and 
legal category of being a member of a class of beings called persons, 
which include God (if such a being exists), ETs (more likely), apes 
and dolphins (most likely with their big brains), and human beings.

In line with animal rights philosophers, I'm quite willing to switch 
criteria from significant mental life to ability to feel pain, but 
fetal physiology also gives a even wider consensus in its conclusion 
that the fetus does not feel pain until about the same time it 
experiences the explosive brain development between 25-33 weeks.  See 
the slides from the fetal brain at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/fetalbrain.htm.

Repeating himself again, and again, and again until anti-abortionists 
come up with a decent counter argument,

Nick Gier 
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