Scientists may have found a way to eliminate chromosome linked to Down syndrome

Fetal/child development is a continuum. The only 2 instances of big change are fertilization and birth, but birth is more a change of environment, not a change of the child.

The way that wants are experienced changes over time. The way a newborn experiences a want is different from the way a 5-year-old experiences a want. We can infer what an embryo wants by what actions the embryo is taking. The embryo is working to grow into an adult.

If we want to go by when brainwaves are detected, that's 5 weeks fetal age, 7 weeks gestational age. There are only 5 places in the world that allow abortion for some age but ban a 7-week-gestational-age abortion:

* Turkmenistan (although for economic or social reasons, it allows up to 22 weeks)

* The US states of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina

* The Mexican state of Aguascalientes

In all 5 places, it's allowed later than 7 weeks in the case of rape.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_law_by_country

>Fetal/child development is a continuum. The only 2 instances of big change are fertilization and birth, but birth is more a change of environment, not a change of the child.

I think the fact that these states constitute big changes is exactly why people intuitively latch on to them as points at which to assign moral value to a developing human. What I’m arguing is that the logic for this falls apart on closer examination, and that the only real reason I see to argue the conception idea comes from religious authority. Yet you haven’t used religion in your arguments so far, so why is it the point for you?

> The way that wants are experienced changes over time. The way a newborn experiences a want is different from the way a 5-year-old experiences a want. We can infer what an embryo wants by what actions the embryo is taking. The embryo is working to grow into an adult.

I absolutely understand this reasoning and I have a certain appreciation for it. The problem is, if you assign single-celled organisms the capacity to want from a perspective, yet you use the capacity to want as your bar for moral consideration, then you are more or less saying any organism of any scale should receive equal moral weight, yet seemingly arbitrarily deciding to restrict this to those with human dna. I don’t think that definition of want is useful; I think the capacity to want needs to be thought of as requiring conscious experience to make much sense here, which is also the thing I’m trying to assign value to.

> If we want to go by when brainwaves are detected, that's 5 weeks fetal age, 7 weeks gestational age.

You’re on the right track. I’m not trying to convince you of a specific cutoff, but of the logic I think should lead those developing a cutoff. I’d want experts in fetal development and brain development and so on to be the ones who decide so that risk of harm is minimized. I imagine there are studies on this; I’ve seen indications the result would be anywhere between 7-24 weeks, but I don’t know precisely when.

> And the only 2 developmental instants are fertilization and birth.

Well not really though, neither takes place in an instant. Both are complex processes that span some time composed of numerous simultaneous and sequential steps. I think some kind of partial personhood is more or less a given because biological processes don’t really happen in discrete steps. As for how that might make sense, a very crude example might be coming out of anesthesia or being extremely drunk. These are states where memory, sense of self, and consciousness can fade in and out independently; perhaps partial consciousness is a reasonable thing. Certainly many of the things we consider essential to our internal sense of personhood develop gradually, like our sense of self and, for that matter, our senses of the external world. We don’t initially, as infants, know the difference between our body and the world. Does this make infants not people? No, not legally or morally, but in some sense they lack aspects we’d associate with personhood.

> Curtis Means was born at gestational age 21 weeks 1 day and survived. If personhood might begin at 24 weeks, does that mean that Curtis might not have been a person when born?

My intuition is that curtis would qualify, and that 21 weeks could be too late for lethal abortion methods. At the same time, if a baby were born braindead I wouldn’t assign it personhood. Being born isn’t enough.

> One way to define a human is any living entity that is either an adult human, or will/would grow into an adult human as long as no problem has happened or will happen to the entity.

A few posts back you complained about "tail-wagging-the-dog" thinking, where one reasons backwards from the conclusions one wishes to reach. Your definition is obviously a product of that style of thinking: instead of clarifying what is or isn't a human, you will use the natural elasticity of terms like "problem" and "entity" to draw your boundary however you wish, based on pre-existing notions, when confronted with a challenge.

For example, if a child dies from starvation, therefore not growing into adulthood, you will of course say that the lack of nutrients is a problem that prevented this child from reaching adulthood, so it's still a human.

But if an unfertilized egg dies due to not being fertilized, I'm sure you would argue that "not being fertilized" doesn't count as a problem; or alternatively, that the fertilized egg is a different entity from the unfertilized egg. But none of this follows naturally from the definition, it requires our notions of "problem" and "entity" to be perfectly aligned to begin with. And you will pick your understanding of "problem" and "entity" based on wanting to prove that the unfertilized egg isn't a human but the starving child is.

Or imagine a child that is born with a mutation that prevents it from reaching adulthood. Clearly we both want to consider this child human. But I would argue that no problem ever "happened" to this entity: the mutation is part of what defines the entity, there is no alternative hypothetical future where it could reach adulthood. According to your definition I could not call this child a human.

> The draft. And a lot of other military rules.

The draft is an example of the state overruling an individual's bodily autonomy, but I specifically said "[...] where the law prioritizes one's duty to care for another over one's bodily autonomy". The draft is not an example of that: it is a case where the law prioritizes protecting the interests/preservation of the state over another's bodily autonomy, which might in some cases coincide with caring for others, but it clearly doesn't have to.

> The captain has a duty to save passengers first before saving self.

Yes, you can enter an agreement with another party where you make a legally binding promise to perform some duty that overrides your bodily autonomy. This is not an example of the law overriding your bodily autonomy, it's an example of how you can use the law to relinquish your own right to bodily autonomy. Getting pregnant does not require such a legally binding promise.

> I don't think that's right [...]

I'm irrefutably correct that the bodily autonomy argument does not depend on the fetus being a person or not. It's a sufficiently prominent argument that it has a section on the "abortion debate" page on wikipedia [0]. Perhaps the argument does not convince you, but that was not my point. I only wished to show that you are mistaken about the pro-choice position being dependent on the non-personhood of the fetus.

At present I'm not interested in starting a parallel discussion about the validity of the bodily autonomy argument. I can leave a video link [1] if you're interested in how it responds to the most obvious challenges, but I will not return to it unless, maybe, the personhood thread is resolved (to avoid a branching tree discussion).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_debate#Bodily_rights

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2PAajlHbnU

>But if an unfertilized egg dies due to not being fertilized, I'm sure you would argue that "not being fertilized" doesn't count as a problem; or alternatively, that the fertilized egg is a different entity from the unfertilized egg. But none of this follows naturally from the definition, it requires our notions of "problem" and "entity" to be perfectly aligned to begin with. And you will pick your understanding of "problem" and "entity" based on wanting to prove that the unfertilized egg isn't a human but the starving child is.

I think there's a clear biological difference between an entity receiving nutrition, and 2 entities, each with half of a set of DNA, coming together to make a single entity with a full set of DNA.

>it is a case where the law prioritizes protecting the interests/preservation of the state over another's bodily autonomy, which might in some cases coincide with caring for others, but it clearly doesn't have to.

What you're saying seems to be that it's ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the state, but not ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the people in the state. My response is (1) mandating citizens protect the state is protecting the people in the state, and (2) if there was some hypothetical case where citizens protecting the state didn't protect the people in the state, I don't see how it would be morally ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the state, but not ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the people in the state.