That Magic Moment
Proponents of abortion and euthanasia assure us that they do not propose to kill human beings. The fetus is not yet human. The patient in a vegetative state is no longer human.
What it is that defines humanity? A criterion frequently trotted out is brain function. Here’s how A Reasonable Man explains it:
But, it seems to me, if you take people’s rights seriously you have to take the rights of the pregnant woman seriously and acknowledge that the decision to continue a pregnancy must be hers (at least at the early stages). At that point, she’s the only human being involved. A fertilized egg might be a potential human being, but until its brain begins to operate as born humans’ brains do, it isn’t a human being yet.
His argument begs the question. The obvious reply is that the fetal brain operates exactly as does any other human brain at that stage of development. But this leaves untouched a larger issue: how did brain function become the criterion of humanity?
The claim is a rhetorical device. Neurology is invoked to misdirect the mind, to cast as a scientific question that which is not.
The invocation is a sham. Science did not and cannot discover that the fetus becomes human at age X. There can be no experimental evidence that could falsify or verify such a claim. There is no moment when a fetal human becomes a human being, no more than there is a moment when a fetal dog becomes a real dog, or an acorn becomes an oak.
A claim that the fetus is not human could make sense from a religious point of view. One might believe that at some point God grants the fetus a soul, and so transforms mere living matter into a person. The idea is consistent with supernaturalism. It is nonsense within a materialistic philosophy. Without recourse to the supernatural, there can be no magical moment of transformation from non-human to human. This transformation is simply a convenient legal fiction.
The proponents of abortion and euthanasia use scientific words to spin the issues of whether and when to legalize killing. The goal is to frame the argument in a certain way. It is hard to say that yes, the fetus is human, but infanticide is rather convenient. It is bad spin to say that, yes, the man in a coma is human, but it is tedious and expensive to keep him alive.
Infanticide has a long pedigree. Romans left unwanted infants to die of exposure. The Romans were brutal, but they had no illusions about what they were doing. Today’s practitioners of infanticide refuse to look in the mirror.
I asked what defines a humanity, and rejected brain function as an answer. I think the answer is simple, free of supernaturalism, and consistent with science. Someone is human whose parents are human.
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