"The brain hasn't turned on yet, so it's okay to kill"

One of the arguments I've heard from pro-choicers is that "The brain hasn't turned on yet, so it's okay to kill".
Now, I personally vehemently disagree with this claim, the claim that the brain hasn't "turned on" yet, but let's, just for the sake of argument here, assume this claim was true.

Let's give this a little bit of thought.

If I were to administer a pharmacological drug to you that had an effect of temporarily turning off the brain, and then I decided to terminate your body by impaling you in the back of the head with pickaxe, would that be okay?

I didn't think so.

It doesn't really matter whether the brain happens to be "on" or "off" at that period of time.
The very fact is, if that brain exists (and can function in the future) it's wrong to kill.

The existence of the brain and all its structures constitute personhood. You are depriving that human being of potentiality.

It's like a telephone. Philosophically speaking, a telephone is only a telephone if it can function as a telephone. That is, if someone can make a call on it. But the fact that a telephone has never been used before does not make it not a telephone.
Now if you take a telephone and disconnect the base from the receiver, that does not make it not a telephone. If you open a new box from the store and the receiver has never been connected to the telephone base before (maybe the factory has really bad quality control), that does not make it not a telephone.
It's true a connection needs to be made and the handset cord needs to be plugged in before it will function, but it is still a telephone.

If those brain structures are there, it is a human being. Even if those brain structures and neurons haven't been turned on yet.

You might also argue the developing preborn baby has not developed any experiences or personality yet.
Consider that a lot of a young child's personality is instinctual, based off genetics. Just like animals often know how to eat and walk without ever having to be taught. We also do not know exactly what type of experiences a developing human being has in the womb. They might not be able to see or hear, but if we remember the case of Helen Keller, she was definitely a person (of remarkable intellectual capacity, by the way) even though she was never able to see or hear anything her entire life.

I think the claim that a brain that has not been turned on yet should not be accorded the rights of a person raises some deep and troubling philosophical, moral, and ethical issues.
We could imagine some dystopian future where human beings are cloned in tanks and their consciousness is not turned on until they reach the adult stage. Some of these human beings might simply be terminated out of convenience, before being woken up, with the society viewing them as unlike other human beings and not deserving of rights.
This argument from pro-choicers opens up the door for that to happen.

 

Who said this?

Why do you disagree?

No.

Thankfully.

So, right to life is based on having a brain now?

Potentials. Do. Not. Have. Rights.

What a stupid analogy.

What on Earth are you talking about?

That's a fact.

Human beings do not have any automated responses or inherent behaviours.

One yuuuuge difference; Keller was born.

Let's instead imagine Taylor Swift is my girlfriend -- How jealous are you on a scale 1-10?

 

If your brain was not "turned on" and functioning, would you concede that you would still exist?

Or at least that you'd have a right for the body in which that brain inhabits not to be killed, because of your future potentiality?

I disagree. If we knew that your brain was off and that it was never going to be able to turn back on, we would consider you to be gone. To be effectively dead.
Terminating your body at that point would not really be terminating "you".

I'd also argue that it would be much worse to kill some young person full of future potential than it would be to kill some 95-year-old who is dying in hospice care and probably only has less than a month to live. That young person would have a greater right to their life than that old person, simply due to potentiality.

 

Define "turned on" and "functioning".

 

Well again, this is a counterargument in a response to an argument from some pro-choicers, so I think it would be more appropriate to let them define the parameters of those terms in this argument.

 

Are you implying that you personally believe the fetus's brain has already turned on?

 

""""The brain hasn't turned on yet, so it's okay to kill".


WHERE and WHO said this??

 

Here is a record of posts in past threads discussing this:

 

from the thread "No mind, no person"

 

our republican leaders brains have turned off, they think it's ok to force rape victims to have their rapists babies

 

I did NOT find : """""""The brain hasn't turned on yet, so it's okay to kill".""" anywhere in that...

 

Wow, sounds like you're trying to derail yet another abortion thread by bringing up the topic of rape...

Sorry, no one is going to respond to that here. We're going to stay on topic. We're not going to let every thread in the Abortion section get turned into an argument about rape.

If you want to talk about rape, do it in another thread.
But you don't want to. You just want to try to derail other people's threads because the main argument doesn't seem to be going well for your side.

Trying to change the subject to rape is just an act of desperation.

 

But that's the essence of those arguments.

The words may be different but the meaning is the same.

We know the brain is there. It's hard to argue with that. Pro-choicers are just trying to argue that brain (which exists) is not working yet.

 

seems like your try to derail the thread again by attacking people for bringing up valid issue with abortion bans

the op post sets the tone and it talked about it "raises some deep and troubling philosophical, moral, and ethical issues."

 

Seems like some people don't know how to stay on topic.

You do realize this thread isn't a general discussion about the politics of abortion, right?

Why are you so resistant to starting a separate thread about what you seem to want to talk about?
You could even leave the link to that thread in other threads, if you wanted to.

The fact that you do not do that tells me you are just trying to derail other threads.

 

the op post sets the tone and it talked about it "raises some deep and troubling philosophical, moral, and ethical issues."

if you did not want to talk about those, you should not of brought it up

your title set the tone as divisive, basically calling people murderers that get abortions

 

So is your argument that a preborn baby which resulted from rape has less human rights than a preborn baby that resulted from consensual sexual intercourse?

Or maybe you admit that it is kind of wrong to kill a human being that has some semblance of a mind, but forcing a woman to carry a baby that resulted from rape just crosses the line?

 

just like the soul can leave a body before it dies

the body can exist before the soul enters

 

yep, sorry you can't censor other people's responses, my post was on topic, you just don't like it

 

It isn't....and it doesn't matter if it is or isn't....it's legal to kill the fetus.

 

If I can make your soul leave your body (while your body still remains alive), is it then okay to kill you?


I don't know if you've heard of astral projection, for example. Just throwing that out there.

 

a fetus is not born yet, it has no rights, the potential mother has the rights

per republicans

http://www.slate.com/id/2120872/

"a member of President Bush's Council on Bioethics, describes in his book The Ethical Brain, current neurology suggests that a fetus doesn't possess enough neural structure to harbor consciousness until about 26 weeks, when it first seems to react to pain. Before that, the fetal neural structure is about as sophisticated as that of a sea slug and its EEG as flat and unorganized as that of someone brain-dead."

 

Better than Anti-Choicers who think a ZEF has more rights than the woman it's in.

Or Anti-Choicers who make exception for rape....they think a fetus resulting from rape isn't a "precious life" and has less "rights" than a fetus from consensual sex.

 

if I am inside your uterus, yep, the government can't force you to let me live in there, same is true of a fetus

 

Turning on the brain isn't quite the right phrase. The brain does lots of unconscious coordination that is morally irrelevant. It was more about the existence of the mind. The parts of the brain that allow the fetus to have the most basic of experiences like pain.

Putting somebody to sleep and killing them isn't the same as killing tissue that has never had a mind. The fact that we could use any nucleated cell to make a clone doesn't make every cell a person worth protecting. A clone becomes a new person if and when the mind has existed, asleep or not.

They're not there. The cortex does not have neuronal connections to other parts of the brain to produce consciousness until after about 23 weeks.

Never demanded sophistication, only any mind at all. It's something you ought to know instinctually. Do you cry after killing a puppy or pulling a weed? Both are alive but only one has a mind. Fetuses confuse people though because they look like babies before they have a mind.

Only if stupid and malicious people are in control of such things, though this is what our system of government tends to give us. Most doctors understand ethics. Doctors do these abortions. I only have interest in what some medical ignoramus thinks about this because of the democratic process, but in reality it's neuroscientists who should be guiding such decisons on when personhood begins, and most of them would agree with my analysis, as evidenced by the jama article discussed in the giftedone post you had quoted.