-----Original Message-----
From: john grigg <starman125@hotmail.com>
To: extropians-digest@extropy.org <extropians-digest@extropy.org>
Date: Friday, January 21, 2000 10:56 PM
Subject: rights for late-term and yet unborn human beings...
>
>Isn't a late-term fetus (last trimester) to be honest a... baby? Semantics
>are used to make something appear not so human and so more easily disposed
>of.
What makes human life special and worth preserving does not have anything to
do with our biological properties, it's our mental properties. A fetus lacks
these mental properties. A 3 minute old baby lacks most of them as well,
however, it is immediately upon birth that these properties start to
manifest itself, and mental development follows a timeline which begins at
birth. The length of time it takes a baby to be able to recognize his
mother's face is something like 5 minutes after birth (this figure is not
exact, maybe someone can provide the exact figure). If the baby is a week
premature, the facial recognition still develops 5 minutes after birth - not
a week and five minutes. Although the differences between a baby who is 3
seconds old and a baby who is to be born in 3 seconds are insignificant, it
is this event of birth that serves as a definite and undeniable
"singularity" in development as a thinking being. It's a lot more them
semantics.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Zeb Haradon
My personal website:
http://www.inconnect.com/~zharadon/ubunix/
A movie I'm directing:
http://www.elevatormovie.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:02:29 MDT