Is a fetus a person

[SaintB]

It has human DNA, and it's an alive distinct individual(unlike, say, a corpse or a donated kidney), so it seems to be enough of a person to me to justify it be given a right to life over a woman's right to choose what she does with her body.

Maybe I'm just crazy, but that seems the most logical assumption. I wouldn't have liked to never exist outside the womb, sounds kind of mean to deny that to even a potential human.

If that's the reason then you must also justify not treating cancers.

[DaWoad]

It has human DNA, and it's an alive distinct individual(unlike, say, a corpse or a donated kidney), so it seems to be enough of a person to me to justify it be given a right to life over a woman's right to choose what she does with her body.

How is it a distinct individual? It has human DNA ,sure but so does a tumor and they both probably have about the same amount varience in their DNA from their "host"

[Cabra West]

Is it a living person, though?
A corpse is a person as well, legally speaking, after all.

I would say it is a living person, given all of its cells are still functioning and active (except the relative few that are old and being discarded and replaced all the time - as happens in all humans). I therefore consider it "alive" because of that.

A dead person's cells are shut down or in the process of shutting down. A living person's cells are continuing to run and/or starting up their function.

Not necessarily. Even a braindead person can be kept "alive" on machines for a considerable amount of time these days.
There was a case about 10 years ago where a pregnant woman was in a car accident, brought to hospital, but died. The doctors, in agreement with the family, tried to keep her body alive long enough until the child could safely be born.
The attempt failed after several weeks, as the woman's body contracted pneumonia, and they couldn't sustain it any more due to multiple organ failure. But they had kept her cells and her body alive for weeks after she was officially declared dead. The criterium to determine alive or dead is brain activity. Everything else we can simulate, or keep going.

[Nanatsu no Tsuki]

Well you are free to categorize it how you please. However, I categorize it as a living person with as much rights as we afford other living people - the right to life being foremost among them. However, the fetus' rights cannot impinge upon the rights of other people. I can't force you to give me a kidney if I need it, and the fetus can't force its mother to carry it to term.

Precisely why I say I'm not sure how to catalog a fetus. Person or non-person.

I know some people think of it as a person while others go so far as to speak of it as a parasite. Other affirm that at the moment of conception, this fetus IS a human being (the soul and what not and other religious concepts I think do not matter for this thread). I am not sure, I don't think I'll ever be able to, make up my mind about this subject.

As far as the age of viability goes, I've stated repeatedly that I think that's where the line for "abortion" should be (unless, of course, for medical necessity), and that after that point, we should still allow induced labor or surgical removal of the fetus from the mother as I don't think she should be forced to carry it for one day more than she wants to.

However, that's a different discussion for a different thread.

Indeed it is.

[Galloism]

Not necessarily. Even a braindead person can be kept "alive" on machines for a considerable amount of time these days.
There was a case about 10 years ago where a pregnant woman was in a car accident, brought to hospital, but died. The doctors, in agreement with the family, tried to keep her body alive long enough until the child could safely be born.
The attempt failed after several weeks, as the woman's body contracted pneumonia, and they couldn't sustain it any more due to multiple organ failure. But they had kept her cells and her body alive for weeks after she was officially declared dead. The criterium to determine alive or dead is brain activity. Everything else we can simulate, or keep going.

I thought the criterion to determine whether a person is alive or dead medically had to do with the heart failing to pump blood and the lungs failing to respire in a way that is unrecoverable. I'm not a doctor, sorry, and don't know the legal/medical definitions of things.

In any case, legal, medical, and personal definitions often don't meet the same standard. As a personal definition, I would say that the braindead woman was still a "person", as long as she continued to breathe (assisted or no), blood continued to be pumped around in circles through her arteries and veins, and her body's cells were still functional.

That's not to say that I would object to having the plug pulled, so to speak. I am actually in support of euthanasia for people that have no hope of ever recovering, but that's not quite the same thing.

[Cabra West]

I thought the criterion to determine whether a person is alive or dead medically had to do with the heart failing to pump blood and the lungs failing to respire in a way that is unrecoverable. I'm not a doctor, sorry, and don't know the legal/medical definitions of things.

In any case, legal, medical, and personal definitions often don't meet the same standard. As a personal definition, I would say that the braindead woman was still a "person", as long as she continued to breathe (assisted or no), blood continued to be pumped around in circles through her arteries and veins, and her body's cells were still functional.

That's not to say that I would object to having the plug pulled, so to speak. I am actually in support of euthanasia for people that have no hope of ever recovering, but that's not quite the same thing.

That used to be the criterion, but quite a while ago. Remember, people get resucitated (sp?) after heart failure, if their lungs fail that can be restored as well.
I would definitely say she was a person, but she also was in effect a corpse. We don't lose all our rights the moment we die, otherwise wills would make very little sense.
So in that line of thought, a foetus is a person. But it can't be regarded as a living human being, and therefore its rights are highly restricted.

[Living Freedom Land]

Let me make a few things perfectly clear: I'm for an abortion if the mother's life is in danger or the case is of rape or other similar horrible things that I prefer not to elaborate on because of their screwed up-ness.

And my God I'm being bombarded with so many replies that I can't answer them all. Maybe I need to revise my statement: A fetus is a person for all the reasons I stated, and because it will grow up to be a regular homo sapien just like you and me. Sorry if I was a little ambiguous.

On to some replies:

Since the fetus hasn't experienced outside life, I would put the woman's choice over an unthinking fetus's.

Considering I think a fetus is a person, I wouldn't give any woman or man a right to kill another without a really good case(whether anyone in the situation can actually think).

Ya, but what about the threats to the mother and child's life if the family cant support itself?

Maybe the mom should have thought twice about getting a kid? People should accept the consequences of their actions. And besides, with all the government waste on welfare I highly doubt that the family is going to starve in today's Western world unless their utter idiots. If so, good riddance to the bad genes.

Is it?

Independently?

Yes. Nobody/nothing else has that DNA. It can't live on it's own, but it is a distinct organism.

[Ifreann]

I consider foetuses to be people so I can include them in my cannibal diet.

I wish I was as good of a liberal as you. I just do not like people flavor.

They can be tricky to cook right. And people sushi is not worth the trouble.

[Cabra West]

Ya, but what about the threats to the mother and child's life if the family cant support itself?

Maybe the mom should have thought twice about getting a kid? People should accept the consequences of their actions. And besides, with all the government waste on welfare I highly doubt that the family is going to starve in today's Western world unless their utter idiots. If so, good riddance to the bad genes.

Wow... so you would oppose the mother having an abortion, but you'd happily see them starve to death once the kid's been born?
Wouldn't it be easier and less messy to just let the woman abort the kid, as the end result would be the same anyway?

[The Tofu Islands]

Considering I think a fetus is a person, I wouldn't give any woman or man a right to kill another without a really good case(whether anyone in the situation can actually think).

How about this really good case: the mother's organs are being directly used, after she has withdrawn consent for them to be used, by the fetus.

But that'd be drifting away from the main point, and if you want to continue this discussion, we should head over to the abortion thread (this one).

[You-Gi-Owe]

It has human DNA, and it's an alive distinct individual(unlike, say, a corpse or a donated kidney), so it seems to be enough of a person to me to justify it be given a right to life over a woman's right to choose what she does with her body.

Maybe I'm just crazy, but that seems the most logical assumption. I wouldn't have liked to never exist outside the womb, sounds kind of mean to deny that to even a potential human.

Let me ask you something :

If somebody needed one of your kidneys to survive, should you be forced to donate it?
If not, how can you demand women should be forced to offer their bodies against their wills just so the foetus can survive?

Before my response to this question, can we hypothesize that in general that pregnancy doesn't remove 50% of a body's liquid waste disposal system for the rest of the woman's life?

And now for the section that some people will find incredibly offensive:

1a. Most landlords, when they choose to rent out a house or apartment, realize that there's a possibility that they may want to evict a tenant.

1b. Except in cases of rape, most pregnant women chose to engage in an activity that has the potential to result in pregnancy.

2a. Because of government intervention, a landlord can be forced by the government to delay (sometimes for long periods of time) the eviction of a bad tenant. Hopefully, no life or potential life is destroyed.

2b. Therefore, is it such a far step from a landlord to a pregnant woman, in that a woman should be inconvenienced to carry a new life when she (usually) chose to engage in behavior that can result in pregnancy?

In response to the topic question, a fetus is a person. A fetus is a human being.

[Galloism]

I thought the criterion to determine whether a person is alive or dead medically had to do with the heart failing to pump blood and the lungs failing to respire in a way that is unrecoverable. I'm not a doctor, sorry, and don't know the legal/medical definitions of things.

In any case, legal, medical, and personal definitions often don't meet the same standard. As a personal definition, I would say that the braindead woman was still a "person", as long as she continued to breathe (assisted or no), blood continued to be pumped around in circles through her arteries and veins, and her body's cells were still functional.

That's not to say that I would object to having the plug pulled, so to speak. I am actually in support of euthanasia for people that have no hope of ever recovering, but that's not quite the same thing.

That used to be the criterion, but quite a while ago. Remember, people get resuscitated (fixed your spelling - you should get Firefox) after heart failure, if their lungs fail that can be restored as well.
I would definitely say she was a person, but she also was in effect a corpse. We don't lose all our rights the moment we die, otherwise wills would make very little sense.
So in that line of thought, a foetus is a person. But it can't be regarded as a living human being, and therefore its rights are highly restricted.

See, I would consider a living human being, for the reasons I specified. You may not agree with it, and that's fine, as I'm not trying to put it into law anywhere (Georgia did, though). I therefore believe, as a living individual homo sapien, it has a right to life as any other living homo sapien. In any case, it matters very little because the fetus can't, at this point, survive on its own until very late in the pregnancy where almost no abortions occur. The fetus (like any other person) also has no right to demand another person use his or her body to support it. That's just the way it is.

However, also unlike the braindead individual on the table, a fetus still has potential. The braindead person doesn't - you can support them forever (within reason) and they will never recover and become a functioning person again, and they therefore have no current or future quality of life. That's why I would support the euthanasia a 60 year old braindead woman with no hope of recovery and object to a voluntary abortion of an 8 month old fetus. Before you jump down my throat, I know that almost never fucking happens, but I'm just giving my opinion on where I draw the line in my mind.

As far as the "dead" criterion, a couple of years ago a friend of mine suffered severe carbon monoxide poisoning (long story) and was rushed to the hospital with no respiration and no pulse. The doctors told him he was "dead" (their term) for 9 minutes. Therefore, that's how I always took "dead" to mean from a medical standpoint. Of course, from a legal standpoint, he never "died" but the doctors seemed to think he did from a medical standpoint - until they brought him back. That's just my 2 cents.

[Cabra West]

It has human DNA, and it's an alive distinct individual(unlike, say, a corpse or a donated kidney), so it seems to be enough of a person to me to justify it be given a right to life over a woman's right to choose what she does with her body.

Maybe I'm just crazy, but that seems the most logical assumption. I wouldn't have liked to never exist outside the womb, sounds kind of mean to deny that to even a potential human.

Let me ask you something :

If somebody needed one of your kidneys to survive, should you be forced to donate it?
If not, how can you demand women should be forced to offer their bodies against their wills just so the foetus can survive?

Before my response to this question, can we hypothesize that in general that pregnancy doesn't remove 50% of a body's liquid waste disposal system for the rest of the woman's life?

And now for the section that some people will find incredibly offensive:

1a. Most landlords, when they choose to rent out a house or apartment, realize that there's a possibility that they may want to evict a tenant.

1b. Except in cases of rape, most pregnant women chose to engage in an activity that has the potential to result in pregnancy.

2a. Because of government intervention, a landlord can be forced by the government to delay (sometimes for long periods of time) the eviction of a bad tenant. Hopefully, no life or potential life is destroyed.

2b. Therefore, is it such a far step from a landlord to a pregnant woman, in that a woman should be inconvenienced to carry a new life when she (usually)chose to engage in behavior that can result in pregnancy?

In response to the topic question, a fetus is a person. A fetus is a human being.

You're right, pregnancy can actually be a lot more damaging than just losing a kidney. So that's where my argument fails.

I think there is a slight difference between owning a property and deciding to rent it out, and finding somebody you never gave permission to using the vital systems of your body for their own purposes.
Agreeing to have sex does not equal agreeing to get pregnant. Otherwise you could argue that anybody who got into a car chooses to engage in behaviour that can lead to a car crash, and should therefore live with the consequences and not receive any medical attention.

[DaWoad]

I think part of the issue may be "life". We have this idea (we kind of have to just to function) that there is a point at which someone is dead as opposed to alive. The problems with that are multifold. First, when a person is braindead the majority of their cells may or may not be alive. Certain functions will continue for a certain amount of time regardless of how it happens or what others do. Two examples,
1) you cut the femoral artory you bleed out in minutes or less and your cells died soon after without help and your systems immediately begin dying off
2) you get a systemic disease which kills off your brain cells. Soon all thats left is random firing but your body is kept alive via bypass etc.

in the first case the difference between a healthy, fully functional person's body and the case study is huge, visible on a macro scale. In the second, though, the differences are somewhat less pronounced. Physically the difference between this person who is, in fact, dead(Whose head could litterally be cut off with(if the systems we're in place)little to no effect) and a fully functional person are tiny if they are present at all from the neck down. So here's the issue. If we define that second person as Dead then do we define every person without any brain function as dead? If so fetuses are "dead" until they reach a certain point in their development when they become "alive". Of course its not that simple, the fetus has the potential to come "to life" (as do sperm/ovum but thats a different argument) and the braindead person doesn't . . .probably. Unfortunately thats the issue a "braindead" person can (and they have) very very occasionally come back to life so if we are to assume that every fetus is alive(and thus a person) then every braindead person (including case one) must be considered alive until there is litterally no hope for revival (which medically means that either every system is shot and not replacable or the brain is essentially absent not just no longer firing). Of course this is easier if you just equate life with brain function and it also draws a nice line for abortion issues and is the way I tend to lean but if you go the other way and consider that ("potential for brain activity" + "human DNA" = personhood) then your kind of in a bind as to where you stand on where the line of "death" actually lies.

[Dakini]

My stance on this issue is that a fetus (in the sense of a fetus that can legally be aborted under current canadian Law. Law in the states is essentially the same) is not in fact a person. My reasoning is as follows.

Slight nitpick: There aren't actually any laws on abortion in Canada. There was one that made it illegal, then that one was removed and a new one was not adopted.

[Ifreann]

Ya, but what about the threats to the mother and child's life if the family cant support itself?

Maybe the mom should have thought twice about getting a kid? People should accept the consequences of their actions. And besides, with all the government waste on welfare I highly doubt that the family is going to starve in today's Western world unless their utter idiots. If so, good riddance to the bad genes.

Wow... so you would oppose the mother having an abortion, but you'd happily see them starve to death once the kid's been born?
Wouldn't it be easier and less messy to just let the woman abort the kid, as the end result would be the same anyway?

And a child starving to death will take several painful weeks. An abortion, not so much.

[Living Freedom Land]

*text*

Wow... so you would oppose the mother having an abortion, but you'd happily see them starve to death once the kid's been born?
Wouldn't it be easier and less messy to just let the woman abort the kid, as the end result would be the same anyway?

Isn't it kind of an extreme case? I'd never given a lot of extreme cases much thought, but the extreme does happen. I'd have to give it more thought.

[Grays Harbor]

I consider foetuses to be people so I can include them in my cannibal diet.

I wish I was as good of a liberal as you. I just do not like people flavor.

it all depends on which BBQ sauce you use, apparently. myslef, I stick to a bovine/pig/chicken/fish/shellfish diet.

[The Tofu Islands]

Maybe the mom should have thought twice about getting a kid? People should accept the consequences of their actions. And besides, with all the government waste on welfare I highly doubt that the family is going to starve in today's Western world unless their utter idiots. If so, good riddance to the bad genes.

I'm just going to take issue with the last part (the notes about starvation being worse for the kid then abortion still stand), this absolutely and utterly fails because poverty isn't genetic.

[DaWoad]

Before my response to this question, can we hypothesize that in general that pregnancy doesn't remove 50% of a body's liquid waste disposal system for the rest of the woman's life?

And now for the section that some people will find incredibly offensive:

1a. Most landlords, when they choose to rent out a house or apartment, realize that there's a possibility that they may want to evict a tenant.

1b. Except in cases of rape, most pregnant women chose to engage in an activity that has the potential to result in pregnancy.

2a. Because of government intervention, a landlord can be forced by the government to delay (sometimes for long periods of time) the eviction of a bad tenant. Hopefully, no life or potential life is destroyed.

2b. Therefore, is it such a far step from a landlord to a pregnant woman, in that a woman should be inconvenienced to carry a new life when she (usually) chose to engage in behavior that can result in pregnancy?

In response to the topic question, a fetus is a person. A fetus is a human being.

Apparently you managed to completely ignore my OP . . .thanks try going back and reading it.
1)people this isn't an abortion thread. This is specifically about a fetus being a person. Plenty of abortion threads out there . . .and you can always make a new thread about abortion but this is simply for a discussion of whether a fetus is a person or not.
2)you didn't give any explination for your claim.

Please go back, read the OP and post something better.

[Nanatsu no Tsuki]

Maybe the mom should have thought twice about getting a kid? People should accept the consequences of their actions. And besides, with all the government waste on welfare I highly doubt that the family is going to starve in today's Western world unless their utter idiots. If so, good riddance to the bad genes.

I'm just going to take issue with the last part (the notes about starvation being worse for the kid then abortion still stand), this absolutely and utterly fails because poverty isn't genetic.

It makes him/her sound like the Romans. If they didn't wanted a child, they could leave the baby out and let him/her starve to death.

[DaWoad]

My stance on this issue is that a fetus (in the sense of a fetus that can legally be aborted under current canadian Law. Law in the states is essentially the same) is not in fact a person. My reasoning is as follows.

Slight nitpick: There aren't actually any laws on abortion in Canada. There was one that made it illegal, then that one was removed and a new one was not adopted.

good point. Sorry I think the medical board may have its own guidelines though

[Dakini]

Is it?

Independently?

Yes. Nobody/nothing else has that DNA. It can't live on it's own, but it is a distinct organism.

So identical twins are one person? And chimeras are two?

[Dakini]

My stance on this issue is that a fetus (in the sense of a fetus that can legally be aborted under current canadian Law. Law in the states is essentially the same) is not in fact a person. My reasoning is as follows.

Slight nitpick: There aren't actually any laws on abortion in Canada. There was one that made it illegal, then that one was removed and a new one was not adopted.

good point. Sorry I think the medical board may have its own guidelines though

I'm actually not sure. I think that after a certain point, most doctors just refuse unless it's an issue of health (the procedure does get trickier and riskier the further along the pregnancy).

[Cabra West]

Isn't it kind of an extreme case? I'd never given a lot of extreme cases much thought, but the extreme does happen. I'd have to give it more thought.

Think of it this way : How good a mother do you think a woman who never wanted the kid is going to be? And then think a little further, and think how this will affect the kid, emotionally, mentally and materialistically.

Of course, there's the option of adoption. Which, in reality, means that the child will most likely be handed from institution to institution, possibly go through one or two foster parents, resulting in much the same emotional, mental and general problems.

If you want a society with less "losers", don't force women to have children they don't want.