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question about human fetuses

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BH

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I have a question about human fetal development.

At one point in gestation does the fetus develop a brain large enough to actually be capable of thought and have sentience or personality.

I'm not trying to put politics in the forum but I was talking to some friends of mine about abortion and we all generally lean in the antiabortion on demand camp but we were trying to be open minded and try to see the others sides point.

One thing we could not wrap our minds around was that most prolife people have no problem pulling the plug on life support of a brain dead person, or at least someone whose part of the brain that allows things like personality, thought, ect. If the brain is completely dead or the only parts left are just keeping the hear and lungs going then the person functionally no longer exists. So we were were wondering why it would be wrong to abort a fetus that has not reached the point of developing a brain, or at least one that allows thought, thinking, ect.

I'm not trained in the medical sciences so I know I'm choosing my words poorly but I think you get the gist of what I'm getting at. If you can pull a plug on a person born because they have no more mind then why would doing it to a fetus in the same state be wrong?
 
It did not take me long to find an answer

From the time the neural tube closes, around week 7, the brain will grow at a rate of 250,000 neurons per minute for the next 21 weeks. Ultrasounds can reveal the embryo moving as early as 6 weeks after conception (or 8 pregnancy weeks), detecting the electrical impulses that govern movement and indicating that the brain is beginning to function.
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I have never seen this argument used against abortion.
Ref: https://flo.health/pregnancy/pregnancy-health/fetal-development/fetal-brain-development

This has implications other than abortion. Some people play music while pregnant. This has an impact on the fetus
Ref: https://www.healthline.com/health/pregnancy/music-for-baby-in-womb
 
BH said:
I'm not trained in the medical sciences so I know I'm choosing my words poorly but I think you get the gist of what I'm getting at. If you can pull a plug on a person born because they have no more mind then why would doing it to a fetus in the same state be wrong?
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The short answer is that a brain dead person (assuming you mean caused by injury, disease, stroke etc.) will never get beyond the state they are now in. Whereas an embryo/foetus if left to develop at its own pace will eventually leave the womb.
 
Also no expert. But I think it's safe to say that in the first trimester, when most abortions are carried out, the embryo has about the same ability to react to stimuli as a tree. It can metabolise and it can grow.

By about the 7th month, by which stage abortion is only an option in unusual circumstances, some foetuses are reacting to sound and pressure, but I would argue that doesn't equate to thought.

Only after birth is a baby exposed to the experiences that allow comparison, learning, cogitation.

I think the only vaguely valid argument against abortion relates to destroying potential, a discussion for another thread.

Your brain dead born person no longer has any potential for thought.
 
It is not really a scientific question. It is political, religious, and moral. All subjective.

Medical science can define the biological stages of a fetus, but not what it it means.

Consciousness, awareness, and the rest are subjective at best. In the past the RCC considered condoms immoral because they interfere with the natural process of conception.

For a Catholic who conforms to Vatican morality life begins when penis enters vagina and there is an ejaculation.

Personally I support abortion rights to a point. I an against late term abortions of convenience.

Some consider a heart beat the boundary.

Some think a fetus from conception has all the rights of a child.

It is so contentious because there is no science to say what morality is.
 
steve_bank said:
It is not really a scientific question. It is political, religious, and moral. All subjective.

Medical science can define the biological stages of a fetus, but not what it it means.

Consciousness, awareness, and the rest are subjective at best. In the past the RCC considered condoms immoral because they interfere with the natural process of conception.

For a Catholic who conforms to Vatican morality life begins when penis enters vagina and there is an ejaculation.

Personally I support abortion rights to a point. I an against late term abortions of convenience.

Some consider a heart beat the boundary.

Some think a fetus from conception has all the rights of a child.

It is so contentious because there is no science to say what morality is.
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Re the sentence that I bolded. Those who claim that a fetus from conception has all the rights of a child are hypocrites. If they truly believed this they would make sure the mother had active support from the moment she became pregnant if she is poor, such as medical services, food and shelter. Of course they are often consistent in not caring about the child after it is born either.
But in reality they will not do so.
 
BH said:
At one point in gestation does the fetus develop a brain large enough to actually be capable of thought and have sentience or personality.
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This happens a few months after their birth, as far as I can tell.

It's not actually relevant to anything though; Why do thinking, sentience, or personality matter?

A person is very unlikely to be a useful member of society before the age of thirty, but that doesn't make people below that age particularly expendable (despite what various armies might appear to think).

A person always has the right to withdraw consent to use their body from any other person at any time, regardless of how dependant that person might be on their support.

If you will die without a blood transfusion from me, I have the right to refuse to save your life. If a fetus is in a person's uterus, the owner of that uterus has the right to refuse further occupancy, for any reason or none. If that refusal is fatal to the fetus, then so be it.

None of this is contingent on the degree of thought, sentience or personality development of any of the parties involved.
 
I agree with you on the Christian hypocrisy. It would follow that the anti abortionist would support universal health care and guaranteed nutrition.

Keeping with OP as sticking to science I don't want to derail. An abortion thread.

Elixir

Post in thread 'Abortion'

Defining “life” is for communication purposes, as only examples of life exist and life itself has no objective existence except as a characteristic of those examples.
Same goes for humanity.
I choose to exempt embryos, blastocysts et al from my references to “humans”.
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Every culture and society has some version of the "Thy shall not kill" commandment, yet people are killed everyday. All of these cultures and societies have put a lot of effort into elaborating who this rule protects and whose murder is permissible. As much as one wishes this could be a distinct line, a line everyone can recognize, it's always been a squiggle that loops and curls back on itself, and worse than that, seems to move without notice.

Unfortunately, in life there is only one distinct line and that's the one between to be, and not being yet. This is a very inconvenient line for just about everybody. For those who want to present themselves as a walking no-kill shelter, it's important to pull a bulge into the line so that a person who recently became a person, doesn't qualify until they look a little bit more like the rest us. It gets weird for those who want to hold the line when it's pointed out that an embryo can come into being in a petri dish and then put into a freezer beside the fish sticks, for later use. If abortion is murder, then so is defrosting. This is the very definition of a "first world problem" but the real problem is espousing a social policy that impinges on the privileges afforded only to the wealthy.

The plain fact of human history is we kill each other first and argue about it later. One thing is clear, there are people who can be killed, if we can justify it by some set of arbitrary rules. Being arbitrary, we can change them at will. All that's needed is a fairly large majority of people to agree to do nothing in the case of a particular class or form of murder.

On one end of the spectrum is a newly multi-celled human and at the other end is a Russian General heading to the men's room under the observation of a drone. Either can be killed with impunity, depending on which rules are in force at the time.

In the end, it's the same old tug-o-war. Nobody thinks all life is sacred. We are just arguing over who is more or less sacred than someone else.
 
The human fetal cerebral cortex is not completely connected to the brain until weeks 24 to 25, more or less.

I can dig up some old posts of mine, maybe, that quote neuroscientists in the book "Abortion Rights and Fetal Personhood" edited by Ed Doerr.

But, 24 weeks is roughly the developmental point mentioned in the OP.
 
The pro-punishment crowd likes to claim things like heartbeat at 6 weeks. I forget their exact claim on brain activity but it's also wrong.

At first there is just static from the brain. That's what they are claiming as brain activity. The brain does not exhibit organized activity until the 7th month--and at that point the only abortions will be due to something going very wrong with the fetus because almost any problem with the woman would be resolved by delivery rather than abortion.

(And, likewise, the 6-week "heartbeat" is random electrical activity, not an organ pumping blood.)

And, personally, I see only one difference between man and animal--the mind. Thus I define what warrants protection as from first consciousness to last consciousness. There's no mind outside that range. (Yes, I realize both of these can be hard to pin down. That doesn't change the basic reasoning, it just indicates a proxy might be needed.)
 
Loren Pechtel said:
I see only one difference between man and animal--the mind.
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Meh. Unwarranted speciesism IMO.
The only manifest difference in minds is human technology.
The next time a fetus produces a new kind of cellphone that can detect sleeping breath sounds and silences itself (or something innovative) I will join the “Right to Life Protoplasm” movement.
I don’t even know anyone who claims to remember the trials and tribulations of being a fetus, let alone any technology they were thinking about at the time.
 
Elixir said:
Loren Pechtel said:
I see only one difference between man and animal--the mind.
Click to expand...
Meh. Unwarranted speciesism IMO.
The only manifest difference in minds is human technology.
The next time a fetus produces a new kind of cellphone that can detect sleeping breath sounds and silences itself (or something innovative) I will join the “Right to Life Protoplasm” movement.
I don’t even know anyone who claims to remember the trials and tribulations of being a fetus, let alone any technology they were thinking about at the time.
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Technology is the manifestation of said mind.

Simple test. Brain transplantation becomes viable. Do you want to be the donor or the recipient?
 
Loren Pechtel said:
Technology is the manifestation of said mind.
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Right. My point is so what?
The proclivity for trying to control others' reproductive behavior is just as outa control in humans as in most sexually dimorphic terrestrial animals. Technology hasn't mitigated that. All it has done, from most others' perspective, is endanger or exterminate lots of other species.
 
Bronzeage said:
It gets weird for those who want to hold the line when it's pointed out that an embryo can come into being in a petri dish and then put into a freezer beside the fish sticks, for later use. If abortion is murder, then so is defrosting.
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If abortion is murder, it also means god is the worst of the worst of all murderers.
But for some reason he gets a pass. He must think he's Donald Trump or something.
 
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