Riddle me this
Apr. 11th, 2012 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
essentialsaltesQ: When does life begin?
A: Three and a half billion years ago.
In the abortion debate, there's a lot of talk (on one side, anyway) about 'when life begins'. But life is continuous. You're alive, your fetal self was alive, your zygote-y self was alive, your parents' gametes were alive, your parents were alive, and so on, back a few billion years. At no point in this history is everything dead, with life beginning anew.
The same goes for 'human', which is sometimes substituted with pseudoscientific authority. The fetus is human. Well, so are the egg and the sperm. They're not gibbon sperm, or lizard eggs. That only goes back a million years or so, of course, but the point is that humanness does not spring de novo from something non-human every time someone is conceived.
The question is about legal personhood. And this is not some sort of debating shuck and jive. The debate is about legal issues, and the Constitution refers to the rights of the people (aka persons).
And what makes a legal person is not immediately obvious. Since a corporation is a legal person, we can say that personhood begins (I suppose) at the ratification of the articles of incorporation. It is difficult to see how to apply this to people-persons, er... human-persons, er... biological-persons.
Here endeth the blogging.
A: Three and a half billion years ago.
In the abortion debate, there's a lot of talk (on one side, anyway) about 'when life begins'. But life is continuous. You're alive, your fetal self was alive, your zygote-y self was alive, your parents' gametes were alive, your parents were alive, and so on, back a few billion years. At no point in this history is everything dead, with life beginning anew.
The same goes for 'human', which is sometimes substituted with pseudoscientific authority. The fetus is human. Well, so are the egg and the sperm. They're not gibbon sperm, or lizard eggs. That only goes back a million years or so, of course, but the point is that humanness does not spring de novo from something non-human every time someone is conceived.
The question is about legal personhood. And this is not some sort of debating shuck and jive. The debate is about legal issues, and the Constitution refers to the rights of the people (aka persons).
And what makes a legal person is not immediately obvious. Since a corporation is a legal person, we can say that personhood begins (I suppose) at the ratification of the articles of incorporation. It is difficult to see how to apply this to people-persons, er... human-persons, er... biological-persons.
Here endeth the blogging.
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no subject
Date: 2012-04-11 06:24 pm (UTC)Which is one reason it makes a decent parallel to the abortion debate. There is no agreement on the part of "society" that a fetus is a human person, so all the rhetoric about "beating hearts" is rather beside the point. Not all creatures with beating hearts are human, and up until recently, Dick Cheney was an example of a human without a beating heart. Until the pro-life faction obtains the legal acknowledgement of "fetal personhood" they are seeking in many localities, they are unlikely to be able to make much change to the settled law regarding abortion.
--- Ajax.