this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
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Abortion should be legal in all cases, but a fetus becomes a unique individual when there is clear, identifiable, brainwave activity.
If there's no brainwave activity, it's not a life, no matter how many weeks old pre-birth or how many years old after birth.
The thread replying to the parent comment is a good example of how restricting abortion access requires people to arbitrarily decide definitions of when a fetus "becomes human."
It's best to leave that decision up to the pregnant person in consultation with their medical providers.
This is another arbitrary definition of personhood. That doesn't mean it's wrong. But there are other (equally arbitrary) definitions that are reasonable too. (And there are a bunch of unreasonable definitions, but we don't need to go into those.)
The one that chaps my ass is the whole "abortion stops a beating heart".
Yeah, and with the appropriate chemicals and electricity, you can make a heart beat in a petrie dish, that doesn't make it "life".
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/02/stem-cell-research-heart-disease-long-qt
On the flip side, I personally had an incident back in January where my heart stopped for 8 seconds. There have been a few other smaller pauses since then, 4 seconds here, 5 seconds there.
So clearly a heartbeat isn't entirely what makes you, you.