At what point, from conception does a ''phetus'' become a human being?

Signal,


One possible legal intuition behind it could be something like this:

Any crime, that by its nature is such that it requires at least two persons to commit it, can justly be persecuted only if all the involved persons are prosecuted.

For example: illegal drugs. There are at least three persons necessarily involved: the producer, the distributor and the user (they can of course also be one and the same person, hence the three are only different roles; but usually, it is two or three different persons). In most countries, all three roles are criminal. It is not that the user would take the whole responsibility and culpability, and the producer and distributor would be innocent.
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But they've each, individually, commited a crime.
It would just confuse things more don't you think?


By similar reasoning, an unwanted pregnancy is a crime that requires both the mother and the father in order to commit it.
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Is an unwanted pregnance a crime though?
The crime would be the killing of another human being.


But since for the majority of human history, it has been impossible to establish with certainty who the father is, while it is certain who the mother is, even theoretically, only one accomplice is knowable (namely the mother). It would not be fair that in a crime that by its nature is such that it requires at least two persons to commit it, only one person would bear the whole burden of the crime.
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Who decides whether the baby lives or dies?
If it were a crime, that would be the person who was responsible.


To consider abortion murder, but only punishing the woman, would not be just, as it would ignore the role of the child's father, who may be just as guilty as the mother to bring about an unwanted child.
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My question is only: why isn't it considered murder. I am not making the point that it should be murder. I'm interested in how the system of the law
ruled that it is not murder even though it involves taking the life of another human being.
If it's not regarded as a human being, therefore cannot be classed as murder, then that is the point of the thread.


jan.
 
It's not murder even if it were another human being because no one is obliged to donate their body.

Same reason refusing to donate a kidney is not murder.
 
visceral_instinct said:
By continuing to be morons, of course. Who wouldn't want to take a woman's right to her body away? Stupid slut, she had sex, she deserves to be punished!
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I know a couple I'd like to punish, but I wouldn't want them to be anybodies mother. Let's see, start with a woman who is a bad person and force her to have a child she doesn't want and then wait until she's a bad mother before we punish her. Does that sound like a good plan or what?:eek::D
 
KilljoyKlown said:
I know a couple I'd like to punish, but I wouldn't want them to be anybodies mother. Let's see, start with a woman who is a bad person and force her to have a child she doesn't want and then wait until she's a bad mother before we punish her. Does that sound like a good plan or what?:eek::D
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Hahaha...and then eat the baby.
 
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Jan Ardena said:
Time marches on.
We can learn from our transgressions.
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But we still often cannot make up for them.

For example, we like to say we have the right to work - but apparently, it is not within human ability to provide work for everyone who wants to work.
If you kill someone, you, nor any other human, cannot bring them back to life.
 
Jan Ardena said:
But they've each, individually, commited a crime.
It would just confuse things more don't you think?
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No. Some crimes are such that by their nature, they consist of several stages or require several perpetrators.


Is an unwanted pregnance a crime though?
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It can be a stage in the crime process.


Who decides whether the baby lives or dies?
If it were a crime, that would be the person who was responsible.
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There is no agreement on who that is.


My question is only: why isn't it considered murder. I am not making the point that it should be murder. I'm interested in how the system of the law
ruled that it is not murder even though it involves taking the life of another human being.
If it's not regarded as a human being, therefore cannot be classed as murder, then that is the point of the thread.
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There are at least two perspectives to murder: one is from the perspective of who the perpetrator is, and the other from the perspective of who the victim is.

"An unborn is a human, therefore, killing it is murder" is from the perspective of the victim.

"The murderer is clearly definable and can be prosecuted" is from the perspective of the perpetrator.

I contend that the majority of the abortion debates are too narrow in their scope. The relationship between the parents-to-be is crucial. The woman cannot bring a pregnancy, wanted or unwanted, upon herself all by herself, so in the case of an abortion, she cannot be the sole perpetrator (leaving aside the person who actually performs the abortion). The man is a necessary accomplice in the sense that he helped in creating the necessary conditions (ie. conception) for the unwanted pregnancy to occur.

The scenario can be partly compared to a scenario where one person threatens another person with harm unless they harm someone else, and the threatened person commits harm to someone else in order to save themselves. This way, the threatened person has committed a crime under durress, and this is not the same as freely committing it.


So abortion is not murder in the sense that it is not legally clear who the responsible murderer is.

A somewhat similar situation is when a mob kills someone: each person of the mob has contributed an injury, but none of them a fatal one; the victim nonetheless died. So technically, any singular member of the mob is not a murderer, although a murder occured.
 
I don't draw the line, the law does. And your picture is from an anti-choice website, it obviously makes the earlier stages look more human.
 
Not that this, IMO, makes anyone obliged to donate their body to it.

Yes, that's an extreme position and I don't expect anyone to agree with me.
 
Enmos said:
The right to live, the right to freedom. Torture in many cases is not a problem at all.
If other living things have rights it's only because we grant them rights. We decide what right they get and what right they don't get.
The only reason people have rights is because it's us that is handing them out. And just make them up.
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Painlessly or swiftly killing is different from a demented desire to torture. I don't see how one who tortures someone or something else can be seen as anything other than demented or psychopathic.
 
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