Tuesday, January 22, 2008

When does Life begin?

Disclaimer! Disclaimer!
Three things before we start:
  1. If you find there is an issue that hasn't been addressed adequately, please contribute
  2. The points made on this page are to be used as a primer for a discussion on the subject
  3. Thanks for your comments and participation!


    OK, let's be honest. The only reason we are even talking about this issue is to attempt to justify abortion as the legal, ethical, personal right of a person seeking to deal with one of the logical results of intercourse. As a person, you began your journey at a specific time... the question is when?
    In any other context, this discussion would merely be an academic exercise.

    Why Women Choose Abortion

    The 2004 Abortion Supervisory Committee (ASC) Report in New Zealand gave the following grounds on which authorisation was given for abortions in 2003:

    Grounds Total %
    Serious danger to life 11 0.1
    Serious danger to physical health 13 0.1
    Serious danger to mental health 18,279 98.7
    Combination of serious danger to physical and mental health 75 0.4
    Combination of serious danger to life and mental health 4 0.0
    Substantial risk of physically or mentally abnormal seriously handicapped child 123 0.7
    Incest and serious danger to mental health - - Offence under s.131 Crimes Act 1961 and serious danger to mental health 6 0.0
    TOTAL 18,511 100


    Politics, economics, social engineering, eugenics and other subjective personal choices often seem to be at the root of a decision to abort. Historical positions taken by foundational thinker concerning the practice of abortion seem to indicate that objective search for truth was not always the driving force behind the cultural acceptation for ending the life of unborn children.
    • Although not very clear on the exact beginning of "personhood", Spartans frowned upon abortion because it ran counter to the desire to raise strong males for military struggles. Yet in Sparta, the practice of leaving a child to die of exposure on a hillside was not considered murder if the child was judged to be unsuitable for some reason (Morowitz and Trefil 1992)
    • Plato's belief was that the human soul only entered the body at birth and that abortions should be required of any woman expecting a child above the age of 40 years old. If this latter course of action failed, then the parents were expected to "dispose" of the newborn child (Bonner 1985)
    • The Roman stoic philosopher, Seneca, maintains that abortions were frowned upon, but that the practice of aborting to preserve one's figure was common (Tribe 1990)
    • Pythagoreans believed that life, begins at conception which is reflected in the Hippocratic oath to "... neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor [...] make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy." Hippocrates' outright disapproval of abortion stemmed from his belief that conception marked the beginning of a human life (Tribe 1990)
    • Aristotle, like Plato believed that the State should set the acceptable number of children a couple could have. Beyond that number, an abortion should be provided "before sensation and life develops in the embryo" (Bonner 1985).
    What is Life?
    Four primary criteria to determine whether an organism is living or inanimate
    1. Growth
    2. Ability to reproduce
    3. Consumption of energy
    4. Reaction with or impact on its environment
    Wendell M. Stanley, Nobel Prize winner and discoverer of the tobacco mosaic virus stated that "The essence of life is the ability to reproduce. This is accomplished by the utilization of energy to create order out of disorder, to bring together into a specific predetermined pattern from semiorder or even from chaos all the component parts of that pattern with the perpetuation of that pattern with time. This is life." Stanley, Wendell M. 1957. The nature of viruses, cancer, genes and life - a declaration of dependence. Proc. Amer. Philosoph. Soc., 101:357-370.

    What allows us to classify a life form as "human"?
    Compared to other living organisms on Earth, humans are capable of abstract reasoning, language, and introspection. Social interactions between humans have also established an extremely wide variety of traditions, rituals, ethics, values, social norms, and laws which form the basis of human society. A human being has first a human ascendancy and therefore carries a very distinct genetic combination that identifies him as a member of the Homo genus. He has the potential to contribute to and interact in some form and at some level with other members of that group and will, at some point, be able to understand, internalize, develop and instrumentalize similar values. Humanhood is determined by DNA.

    At what point does a human being become a person?
    ...the beginning of a new life is exacted by the beginning of fertilization, the reproductive event which is the essence of life (The Beginning Of Life And The Establishment Of The Continuum).
Since all human beings can be identified through specific DNA patterns, it is reasonable to say that a two-day zygote is human by definition. What allows some people to dispose of a human life at any point prior to birth can be two-fold.
    1. the life of the mother is in danger
    2. the human being has not yet reached the status of "person" in their eyes
So a natural question could be "at what point in the developmental process is a pre-born human being protected as a person"?

What some human embryologists say...
  1. Embryology is the study of development of the new individual from beginning to end. We should, therefore, be alerted as to what contemporary and renowned human embryologists have to say about the beginning of a new life and the beginning of the human being:
    • Moore, Keith L. "This fertilized ovum, known as a zygote, is a large diploid cell that is the beginning, or primordium, of a human being"24
    • Larsen, William J. ".... gametes, which will unite at fertilization to initiate the embryonic development of a new individual."25
    • Carlson, Bruce M. "Human pregnancy begins with the fusion of an egg and a sperm ...."26
    • Patten, Bradley M. p. 13 "Fertilized ovum gives rise to new individual". P. 43: ".... the process of fertilization .... marks the initiation of the life of a new individual."27 Quoting F.R. Lillie: P. 41: ".... in the act of fertilization .... two lives are gathered in one knot .... and are rewoven in a new individual life-history."28
    • Sadler, T.W. "The development of a human being begins with fertilization."29
    • Moore, Keith L. and T.V.N. Persaud. "Human development is a continuous process that begins when an oocyte (ovum) from a female is fertilized by a sperm (spermatozoan) from a male."30
    • O'Rahilly, Ronan and Fabiola Müller. "Fertilization is an important landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed."31
    24 Moore, Keith L. 1988. Essentials of Human Embryology. p. 2. B.C. Decker Co., Toronto
    25 Larsen, William J. 1993. Human Embryology. p. 1. Churchill-Livingston, New York
    26 Carlson, Bruce M. 1994. Human Embryology and Developmental Biology. p. 3. Mosby, St. Louis
    27 Patten, Bradley M. 1968. Human Embryology, 3rd Ed. p. 13. McGraw-Hill, New York
    28     Lillie, F.R 1919. Problems of Fertilization. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago
    29 Sadler, T.W. 1990. Langman's Medical Embryology, 6th Ed. p 3. Williams and Wilkins, Baltimore
    30 Moore, Keith L. and T.V.N. Persaud. 1993. The Developing Human, 5th Ed. p. 1. W.B. Saunders Co., Philadelphia
    31 O'Rahilly, Ronan and Fabiola Muller. 1992. Human Embryology and Teratology. p. 5. Wiley-Liss, New York

    Links


Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)