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IS A FETUS A HUMAN BEING? Part one: Viability

June 7th, 2019 by Matt

This is one of a series of posts based on a class I teach for level 3 NCEA Religious Studies.

In the last few posts we saw that most of the Christian religious tradition sketched the following argument against feticide;

Premise [1] Killing a human being without justification violates the law of God.

Premise [2] A formed conceptus (i.e. a fetus) is a human being.

Premise [3] In the case of feticide (at least in the majority of cases) insufficient or no justification is forthcoming.

In this next series of posts, we will look at [2], the claim that a fetus, is a human being.

Viability

A very common position put forward today is that a foetus doesn’t become a human being until the point of viability. Viability refers to the point in pre-natal development where a foetus can live outside the mother’s womb. The idea is that fetus is not a human being until it is capable of surviving independently of another individual, before this period, it does not have an independent existence from its mother.

Philosopher Susan Sherwin expresses this idea when she states that a fetus “is wholly dependent on her [the mother’s] unique contribution to its maintenance, while a newborn is physically separate, though still in need of a lot of care”[1]. Current medical technology means that viability occurs around 22-24 weeks after conception. At this point in time an infant that is born prematurely survive and be placed in an incubator.

Objections to viability

Obviously, the claim that a fetus is not a human being until viability is controversial. Several important objections have been raised to this position. We will look at the main ones below.

A. The problem of differing technology

The Philosopher Peter Singer contends that just because a fetus cannot survive independently of its mother that does not mean it is not a human being. This is because whether a fetus is viable or not depends more on the medical technology of a particular culture than any feature of the fetus itself. A fetus that is not viable in a more impoverished country like Chad is viable in a city like Los Angeles. If viability is necessary for something to be a human, then a woman pregnant with a viable fetus in Los Angeles who flies from Los Angeles to Chad carries a human being when she leaves, but this human being ceases to exist when she arrives in India and yet becomes human again when she returns.

2. The problem of conjoined twins

The Philosopher Michael Tooley offers a different criticism of people who claim that viability is the point where a human comes into existence. Tooley argues this claim has the strange implications that conjoined (Siamese) twins are not humans either[2]. Consider conjoined twins Bob and Scott. If Bob is a human being, then since Scott cannot live independently of Bob, Scott must not be a human person. However, it is difficult to see what property Bob has that Scott lacks which would justify considering one a human and the other not. It appears then that one would be forced to conclude that they both are, and are not, human. However, both Bob and Scott are humans and killing one or both of them would be homicide despite this entailing that they are both human beings even though one cannot live independently of the other.

 C. Does Dependence end at Birth

Above we quoted the philosopher Susan Sherwin, Sherwin argued that the difference between a fetus and a newborn infant is that a fetus is dependent on the mothers care and cannot live independently of her. Some Philosophers have argued this is false, they claim that when you reflect on the facts carefully, it is clear that dependence doesn’t end at birth. Philosopher David Oderberg is an example:

A born baby is also totally dependent on its mother, only instead of being fed and sheltered by the mother’s automatic internal processes, it is fed and sheltered by the mother’s consciously controlled external, behaviour. How can that make a difference to whether or not a foetus is a human being?[3]

Peter Singer points out that a new-born is entirely dependent on its mother if it happens to be born in an isolated area where there are no other lactating women or the means of bottle-feeding. An elderly woman may be entirely dependent on her children looking after her. A hiker who breaks her leg a week’s walk from a road will die if her companions do not bring help. Yet in these situations. Yet the hiker, the elderly women or the baby are still t human beings.  He concludes it is not plausible to suggest that the dependence of the non-viable fetus upon its mother makes it non-human.


[1] Susan Sherwin, “Abortion a Feminist Perspective,” in Ethical Issues in Modern Medicine, 5th ed., ed.

Bonnie Steinbock & John D. Arras (Mountain View CA: Mayfield Publishing Co, 1999), 364.

[2] Michael Tooley, “Abortion and Infanticide” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Autumn, 1972), 51

[3] David Oderberg, Applied Ethics: A Non-Consequentialist Approach (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Co, 2000), 5.

 

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1 response so far ↓

  • Never heard of a pre independant viability foetus developing into anything other than a human being. Is this supposed to be a trick with words. All humans are Homo sapien sapien, the zygote is not some other species nor does it ever become some other species even temporarily. A newly fertilised zygote will have the same genetic code 80 years later at death. The idea that ontology recapitulates phylogeny has long since been discredited. Or more simply, humans reproduce humans, dogs reproduce dogs and cats reproduce cats.