Partial Birth Abortion

Unfortunately the "What's wrong with this picture?" thread has been closed, but I thought the topic important enough to warrant another look.I wanted to know: Unless birth will mean certain death for the mother, what justification is there for killing the baby? Killing humans is usually perceived as wrong, and the humanity of a baby at birth can hardly be disputed.
I have heard that abortion is legal before the baby starts breathing. But they practise breathing in the womb - so the reason they're not yet human is due to the absence of air and not through lack of their own ability. Premature babies breathe fine. I know one who survived without aid from any sort of medical equipment.Sincerely,
defenderofthefaith

Defender,Your grasp of the complexities of this debate is characterized by the fact that you used the word 'baby' four times in your brief post, but only refer to the mother once. Twice if you count 'womb.' It may surprise you to learn that the entire process of an embryo developing into a baby happens inside this fleshy outer casing of the fetus called the mother.Darwinism has damaged my ability to understand these arbitrary distinctions, so maybe you could clarify a few things for me. Does a woman lose her humanity when the egg is fertilized, or when the baby acquires a heartbeat early in the gestation? Does she cease being relevant to the discussion at conception, or when competent medical professionals detect a baby inside her? At what point does she lose her human rights and simply become an incubator?

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The dark nursery of evolution is very dark indeed.
Brad McFall

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so the reason they're not yet human is due to the absence of air and not through lack of their own ability.

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Actually, I feel that whatever we mean by "humanity", with all the rights that comes with it, comes with the development of consciousness. At what point does that occur?

That's even up in the air. Is a person in a coma not human?If A person is in a coma for 30 years, then miraculously comes out of it. Did the 30 year period nake him not human despite the lack of brain activity?Heck, in the deep sleep period we enter every night, brain activity is next to nothing. Are we not human during deep sleep?Consiousness is a different animal all together. If you read up on developmental psychology you hear about when babys aquire a sense of self. This happens a few months after birth, it us unclear weather they have it before hand. does that mean a one week old is not human?See what I mean.

So a 3 year old chimp is human?I think even if we concluded that one criteria, consciousness, lead us to say a 1 week old is not fully human we would add other criteria to make things simpler. The point of birth is one such simplification.

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Common sense isn't

I'd say you could make a pretty good argument that consciousness goes hand-in-hand with language; humans who develop without exposure to language seem unable to do the sort of higher thinking that characterizes humans, even with later exposure to language.Humans who have never been exposed to language have no more consciousness than chimpazees - which is to say, a significant amount of consciousness, but not to a human scale. At least I think you could argue that.

Well, now I play the game where I continue to add one clarification after another, and add a few exceptions, so that those who are human are exactly who I want to be human, heh.Actually, I don't want to get into a detailed arguement as to who is or is not a human with all of the rights pertaining thereto. My opinion is very similar to what Peter Singer wrote about in Practical Ethics. The purpose of my post was to point out that although it may be very clear to defenderofthefaith when one's humanity begins, it's not so clear to the rest of us, or at least the defining criteria is a bit murky.