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Are they sure about that? To me, it looks like the difference between manslaughter (if they die) and not (if they live). You can say that the law doesn't "require" you to save the victim, but the prison sentence on the other side of that choice doesn't make it very convincing.
The assumption that babies simply appear from the ether has weirded me out since I noticed the framing. You weren't kidnapped by a music lover and forced to give life support to another human (unless you were, in which case I support the right to abortion in cases of rape). "Where babies come from" has well-understood causality. If you sign up for baby-making, then you can't act shocked when you make a baby.
I’m split on the use of contraception, which obviously makes me a sinner as a Catholic, but I’m against abortion. It always struck me as disingenuous how the blue tribe seems to get collective amnesia and forget how to be literate when it comes to the matter or abortion. Yet they’ll run news coverage on the Mars rover pinpointing the location of a bacterium and declare to the world they’ve found “life” on another planet. The notion that a right to have sex isn’t a right to get pregnant is a fallacious argument when biology itself happens to disagree with you because, oh I don’t know people actually ‘get’ pregnant by doing it.
But they don't claim to have found people on another planet; a bacterium is alive, but it is not a person. Thus, I would phrase the question not as "When does life begin?" so much as "When does the developing life-form become a person?".
I think you’re going to find it very difficult to circumscribe the ontology of personhood in such a way that wouldn’t arbitrarily involve marking out large swathes of people for the same kind of treatment you would a fetus.
I find birth to be a natural and fitting Schelling point for when one's life becomes the business of society.
Why? The vaginal canal is literally just 3 - 4 inches in length. There is little to no developmental difference between a 28 week old premie and a 28 week old fetus, besides a 3 - 4 inch move.
Schelling points don't track base reality, they track arguments. "28 weeks" is a lot easier to argue about (why not 28 weeks + 1 day? What if it's faster-developing than average? What if they have poor recordkeeping?) than "birth".
There's also little to no developmental difference between a 17.99 year old and an 18.01 year old person, but there's a vast difference in legal status. You can argue about development all day long, but birth either happened or it didn't.
That's less compelling when there are alternative Schelling points, such as viability that do track base reality, at least somewhat.
Viability is significantly worse than time as a Schelling point because it calls for more arguments. It may be better as a practical choice if sticking with reality is more important than avoiding arguments, but that's not what this string of comments has been focusing on.
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