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Rule 1 – The start of life
2009.10.01 CE Rule 1 – Life begins when a woman wants to bring the pregnancy to fruition, or when the unborn can be sustained outside the womb either artificially or with extraordinary care, or once the baby is born (alive and no longer a part of the mother). Each person is born with a certain genetic code which is part of their birth conditions and excluding the characteristics of violence, thievery, or fraudulent behavior shall all be honored equally. Rule 1 is number one because we need to know when life begins. This leaves the beginning of life strictly up to the mother. The father involved may have an objection to this but until men start dying in childbearing, childbirth and postpartum problems than their opinion is not so very important to since no one has the right to require anyone else to put their lives in danger just for their sense of morality. As such I will take the word of the person that can die from the pregnancy. We define life as beginning when the mother wishes to have the baby, or when society can artificially sustain the fetus outside of the womb at the expense of society, and finally if there is some hesitation on the part of the mother then once the baby is delivered either naturally or through C-section it should be considered as a person. If you honestly believe that every conceived zygote must be brought to life, then you will invest as much as you can in the science of maintaining a zygote/fetus outside the woman’s body so you are not endangering other peoples life. If you are unwilling to spend your time, money and effort on this, then don’t ask me to be sympathetic to your cause. There is always a question of what if the mother says nothing? And to that the answer is that one always assumes that by saying nothing you approve of the situation, so she would be approving of the pregnancy. And according to other religions life begins when: Buddhism Christianity Confucianism Hinduism Islam Judaism Jainism Shinto Sikhism Taoism Zoroastrianism. Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Zoroastrians have varying degrees of the definition of when life begins, thus, all of them have a defined point of determining when their actions are right and wrong according to their beliefs. And although we may disagree with them on certain points we can at least make an accurate determination of when they are doing right or wrong based on their beliefs. Christians, Confucians, Jainists, Shintos, Jews, and Taoists do not have a defined definition for when life begins and as such neither they nor anyone else can say for sure when their actions in this matter are morally correct or incorrect. They are moving targets and as such arguing with them will be unproductive as they can claim whatever else in their beliefs they wish. This leaves an extremely important moral issue up to the individual instead of being well-defined and well understood by all amongst themselves and amongst those who must deal with them. Hindus and Buddhists are the only religions that define life as beginning at conception. The remaining religions leave us with becoming a living human being as a process which does not have a clear demarcation point but rather is a slow transition which has no specific point in time you can put your finger on and say this is the absolute moment when you are alive That being the case, our definition solves three problems. The first is how do you treat fetuses in cases of deliberate or accidental harm resulting in termination of their associated pregnancy. In this case if the mother has not stated anything to the contrary it must be accepted that the fetus was intended to be brought to full term and thus would be protected as anybody else against physical harm. In other words the accidental harm to the fetus would be treated the same as the accidental harm to anyone. And the deliberate harm to the fetus would be treated as the deliberate harm to anyone else. The second problem is our basic instinct to preserve all possible life. And since our definition of life is that it is a transitional thing with no absolute line of demarcation from nonliving to living we say that if society has the capability of maintaining a life external to the womb it is societies job to do that and remove any threat from the woman if she so chooses. The third thing it addresses is that once the fetus is capable of surviving on its own outside the womb than we can safely say it is alive and needs to be treated as such even if it is not yet outside the womb. This article is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and the HypatianSociety.org as well as any noted 3rd party attributions. |
