There is no "baby inside the womb". That is a metaphor. The fetus is no more an "unborn child" than you are an "undead corpse" available for composting. You do have the potential to be dead.

The fetus does not have "cognition of themselves". It passively reacts to vague stimuli. Birth is not just another new experience in "our whole lives made up of new experiences". It is the first experience of the new born person. Becoming a biologically independent person from a biologically parasitic is a "change in what we are", to be identified and distinguished conceptually, not lumped together as if the essential differences were irrelevant.

"Gharkness" emotionally accuses people of murder in a rage of profanity then runs away with "Won't read". Such outbursts showing no understanding or desire for understanding of the discussion do not belong on a forum of Ayn Rand's philosophy of reason and individualism.

The clump of undifferentiated mass of cells well after conception doesn't even qualify as a parasitic organism, let a lone a person. It is not human in any way other than human cells. The anti-abortionists chanting otherwise are so ridiculous that they have to appeal to the substitute emotional imagery they conjure for late pregnancy that you refer to. Even that demagoguery isn't enough for them so they now dishonestly go beyond birth to hysterical claims of literal post birth "infanticide" (a redundancy, but they don't grasp that) as "abortion" (a self-contradiction), which is what they have now done on this forum by promoting the dishonest article on Virginia.

A good lecture to listen to or review is Leonard Peikoff's 1998 Ford Hall Forum talk "A Picture is Not an Argument" at http://www.peikoff.com/2014/11/17/a-p... One of the picture-substitutes he describes is the anti-abortionists' imagery replacing concepts with percepts and emotion.

So, when the going gets tough, you start arguing with someone else and refute "anti-abortionists" arguments instead of mine. I was specifically speaking of a child immediately before and after birth, you've jumped to clumps of cells and declared "the differences have been described several times" -- but that's not really the case, you repeatedly declare that a difference obviously exists, but do not describe it in biological terms, instead shifting your arguments to rights and person hood which are philosophical, not biological concepts.

And you end with a word salad that speaks to none of the issues that I was talking about but those irrational anti-abortionists and barbarically forcing women to bear children, none of which I've mentioned.

Clearly you would rather argue with them than with me and that's fine. I've actually not expressed an opinion on abortion, just the nature of human development.

Not every conscious being is a human being. Having primitive brain activity, let alone consciousness, is a necessary condition for being a human, not a sufficient condition. You can't argue from 'no brain activity in person implies person is dead' to get 'any kind of brain activity implies human person'. That would be a fallacy in several ways.

Everyone can and does know what a human person is without advanced knowledge of biology. The anti-abortionists lump human beings together with something else that is not persons, including cells at conception, and demand that we regard it as if were a person. Subjectively lumping different things together without regard to essential similarities and differences is an invalid concept, not the basis of a logical argument -- except in the imaginations of those who misappropriate "logic" for the flim flam of rationalistic verbal manipulation that departs from reality at the first step.

The "same organism", which is functioning vastly differently in a different context after birth than before, is not a person before birth. The differences have been described several times. A refusal to think conceptually in terms of rights, persons, morality, barbaric mistreatment of a woman forced to bear a child, the meaning of biologically parasitic dependence, the differences between pre and post birth, and the meaning of the entire process, cannot in logic stare perceptually at 'here now same organism' and demand we reach an alleged conceptual conclusion of an entitlement of the unborn to be born.

The entire process of grand larceny through bulk stolen concepts employing deliberate context dropping as a strategy is thought divorced from concepts and reality, not a 'scientific' approach.

But that isn't where it stops. The same fallacy is typically expanded by anti-abortionists into a chain non sequitur to ague that they can't tell the difference from one infinitesimal moment to the next all the way back to conception so cells at conception must be a person with rights.

When an argument winds up in an absurdity it means in logic that something was wrong with the argument -- a reductio ad absurdum -- but the anti-abortionists demand that we accept the absurdity and throw out reality, including the women barbarically forced to bear children, sacrificed to the absurdity of clumps of cells at conception mystically imagined to be a person. It is argument devoid of concepts and reality, rationalizing verbal manipulations as if logic were the handmaiden for emotional dogma. It is not science and objectivity.

Well, one has to have brain waves to be a conscious being, doesn't he?

Beware of arguments about objective reality that consist of "everyone knows what that means". I have repeatedly said that objectively just before and just after birth it's the same biological organism. Objectively they ARE the same.

Can you give any objective, measurable difference in what it is. (By the way, you may have to take it out to check).

Yes I know, but over 90% of abortions are in the first trimester and they want them all banned, but have no politically literate arguments, so are left with dishonest appeal-to-emotions, by the visuals of the rarest type of abortion.
It gets tiresome.

There is a continuous process with a primitive mental function developing right up to the time of birth. It has to work out that way or it wouldn't ready and there would be a much different biological context from a different evolutionary path than what occurred -- so there must be "similarities". But passively reacting to stimuli like a vacuum cleaner noises coming in from the outside as "soothing" is a very crude and low resolution that does not allow for the same kind of discrimination of entities for perception, and choice of where to focus, that comes later, and doesn't negate the total biologically parasitic state.

You are right to start with the known rights of women known to have them and why. The anti-abortionists do the exact opposite, with obsessive concern over "rights" of the unborn beginning with conception and no concern for the women. It started with church doctrine speculating about mystic souls and a contempt for human well being and happiness on earth. That has always been barbaric.

Some abortions do occur a couple of days before impending birth, but is very rare typically done for reasons of health.

Birth is a fact, not arbitrary. For later rights, civil rights such as property ownership requirements defined in law must be objectively formulated to serve a proper purpose. That is not arbitrary, but there are optional ranges for definitions (just like the simpler case of speed limits).

Objectivity in law means both an objective justification and an objective definition telling everyone what the law is. If you can't justify a particular point over others within a range then it doesn't matter which one it is, but something must be chosen and fixed so that everyone knows what it is and you must know that it is optional before doing it or invoking secondary considerations to decide. So there is a sense in which it has to be optional, but that does not mean arbitrary.

A key point is to remember that you aren't trying to discover something intrinsic to reality, and neither are you subjectively deciding. You must, in accordance with the proper principles, objectively identify goals and relevant facts to whatever degree of precision you can and need to, defined in a way that is practical to implement for the purpose.

This also arises in defining birth, which does not occur instantaneously -- is it 1 minute after this, or required to be before that, etc. But the requirement to be born -- outside of the womb as a biologically independent entity -- is not arbitrary. Deciding on such definitions is not a big controversy if everyone understands the basic principles and the process isn't corrupted by an anti-abortion "rights of cells" agenda, etc.

For laws regarding later stages of adolescent and adult life, people do mature at different rates and have other differences, which must be taken into account when defining a range of options and possible exceptions depending on well-defined conditions.

Adults can also differ, but the law can specify what can be normally and reasonably understood. If some don't take the responsibility to do that then they are outside of the law without excuse. If a large portion of the culture is ignorant of basic principles then trying to establish a civilized society is a big problem no matter what you do.

"The fetus is not biologically identical to a new born infant. "
"the barbaric process of forcing women to bear children."
Thank you for the interesting discussion. This stands out to me b/c I find the use of force to make people be incubators for another absolutely barbaric and immoral. At the same time, I see babies under 3 months as being in the "fourth trimester". Loud sounds, even a vacuum cleaner, consistent with the sounds in the womb sooth them. This makes me think newborns and third-trimester fetuses are similar in some ways.

So I am torn but err on the side of not forcing people to support/carry someone.

I don't need to make an argument for the self evident.
No abortion occurs a couple of days before birth, so it's an irrelevant comparison anyway.
A sleeping person is not an unborn person for obvious reasons that if you can't see, I'm not sure we have a basis for any discussion anyway.
For example, if you dispute the self evident fact that 1+1 = 2, requiring supporting arguments for something that straight forward, then no real discussion is possible.
In other words, you are intentionally playing dumb, to avoid conceding.
Also, detailed arguments have been repeatedly provided by others here, so I would just direct you to any post by ewv.

An objective morality is not cultural relativism. It does not depend on "society". One cannot discuss or understand the violation of rights of a woman forced to bear children or the alleged "rights" of the unborn by carefully avoiding mentioning the central concept of rights.

A person is a human being. Everyone knows what that means. It does not require "voting". Moral philosophy does not require advanced special knowledge of the special sciences such as biology to understand what a person, a fetus and more primitive stages are. People knew this centuries ago.

The fetus is not biologically identical to a new born infant. It's functioning is radically different, as has been discussed on this forum several times.

Having ruled out thinking in terms of rights, person, philosophy, and the difference between pre and post birth, insisting that only a structural "biology of an organism" out of context and without regard to function may be employed, you are understandably left not able to make essential distinctions, and in the name of science, emotionally accept the barbaric process of forcing women to bear children.

You can use the "Flag" link to report inappropriate posts.

I have carefully avoided mentioning rights because those are acknowledged by the members of the society you are in. And the use of the word "person" is not a biological term so once again it has to do with what the members of the society indicate. We acknowledge the rights of personhood at various points in the human's development. For example we don't allow you to vote until you are 18 in the U.S. so from the point of politics, you aren't a person until then.

Biologically, though, I stick with my position that the organism is biologically identical before and after birth. Of course after birth it will go through another period of rapid change because it's in a significantly different environment and has to do that breathing thing.

A sincere question, but yes some people do have things this backwards.

His posts here, yes. But they aren't always this bad, especially on some other narrower political topics that are not abstract and not related to religion.

That didn't start in his posts only a couple of days ago. Not every conservative on this forum (or elsewhere) is generally dishonest, but the dogmatic evasiveness in his posts is.

You have to be a person before you can be a sleeping person. Moral principles pertain to an entire life span of the person, not moment by moment out of context. It's a biological fact that people require sleep; that doesn't make us lose our rights every time we go to bed. This is a philosophy rooted in fact, not rationalism. The concept of man includes all aspects of man, including the nature and necessity of sleep, and so does the concept of man's rights.

A fetus is a potential person, not a person, and so are the original cells at conception. They are part of the development of what will be a person, and are a requirement for the person's life to begin as a person. The concept of rights does not apply to a potential human being, and can't be smuggled into cells or fetuses in the name of an entire "life" including before becoming a person at birth. The concept of rights cannot be rationalistically made to apply with a verbal manipulation. The floating abstraction version of 'rights' remains a floating abstraction.

This is neither religion nor context dropping analytical philosophy.

In that post I was referring to the role of causality versus duty in ethics, refuting the false claim that abortion and contraception allegedly deny causality. In fact they rationally employs causality and deny an unwanted duty falsely promoted as if it were causality. That was the reason for citing only the article "Causality versus Duty".

"Of Living Death" is another great article dealing with a different aspect: the vicious anti-human motives of the Catholic Church’s injunctions on sex, contraception and abortion. That article was referred to elsewhere on this page in the context of "mental health" as a valid reason for abortion: https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...

A person has to be a person before becoming a dead person. It does not follow from that that only brain activity is required to become a person, only that if you are a person and your brain stops you are then a dead person. Is that what you meant?

At conception it is "human" in the sense of being human cells with human dna, but not a person. When it develops "brain waves" at a time still well before birth it is still human in that sense, but still not yet a person.

That's a statement, not a logical argument. Can you elaborate on what those differences are? Specifically between one a couple of days before and after birth. A 20 year old sleeping is going to have a lot more going on.

I'm making looking at this from an objective biological perspective without any reference to a soul -- which is the religious argument.

That's what a few of us are basically wondering, but ewv gives a plausible reason below.