From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!arens@UCBKIM Newsgroups: net.women Title: Re: Rational Argument Against Abortion Article-I.D.: ucbvax.744 Posted: Fri Jan 28 18:29:58 1983 Received: Sat Jan 29 06:17:12 1983 From: arens@UCBKIM (Yigal Arens) Received: from UCBKIM.BERKELEY.ARPA by UCBVAX.BERKELEY.ARPA (3.300 [1/17/83]) id AA07136; 28 Jan 83 18:29:27 PST (Fri) To: net-women@ucbvax The fact that Mike Dolan raises -- that one can point to no precise moment when a fetus becomes fully human -- doesn't necessarily imply that the fetus was ALWAYS human. This is simply another case of a continuous process leading to a not very clearly defined state. It could be likened to a child growing up and turning into an adult. Clearly a 40 year old woman is and adult. Nothing of substance changed from the age of 10 to 40, and it is impossible to point to a single moment when the transition took place. But nobody claims that a 10 year old girl is an adult! What took place was a gradual transition from childhood to adulthood, and adulthood itself is a "fuzzy" concept that of its nature doesn't allow one to pinpoint its inception. The transition from a fertilized ovum to a newborn baby is another case of this. Clearly, the newly fertilized egg is NOT human, and just as clearly a baby 5 minutes before birth IS human. And there is no single moment along the way where the transition takes place. It's a matter of degree. Abortion on a newly fertilized egg is a medical procedure performed on the body of a woman, and aborting a soon to be born child is killing it. But there is no simple point along the way where one turns into the other. It is basically a personal moral decision which the state should get involved in only in the extreme case. We have to face it -- not everything is simple and clear. In the case of adulthood the state can, more or less arbitrarily, decide that it is legally reached at the age of 16, or 18, or 21, because the consequences of such a decision are not too severe. But the consequences of deciding, necessarily in an arbitrary fashion, that humanness begins at conception, are VERY serious. Yigal Arens UC Berkeley