☕ David Antoine Wow... Found an old article were a Washington Post journalist is seriously asking this : "'After-birth abortion': Can they be serious?"... Maybe I'm misunderstanding what she has written but she seems to have difficulties to reconcile her pro-choice stance to the natural revulsion any sane human being would have by hearing any case made for infanticide (or 'after-birth abortion' for the politically correct version apparently). I hope that insanity will never become a legal right. washingtonpost.com...

Martijn The real problem I am seeing here is establishing the line during the gestation process before which an abortion is allowed to take place. This line is somewhere around 22 weeks of pregnancy in the Netherlands. With modern technology it is possible to keep prematurely delivered outside of a womb until fully gestated, and the earliest surviving might have been delivered before that 22 weeks line... It is completely feasible that we will learn to support a fetus to full gestation outside a natural womb. So when are these born? When are you still allowed to terminate the gestation? Is this really bound to a location (natural womb)?

☕ David Antoine But is there really a line after the conception? Doesn't life starts when fertilization occurs? That's the biological line, that can even be in vitro. After that, there isn't any "special" event when the embryo is going from a bunch of cells to a human being. I's totally subjective. It's 22 weeks in your country and allowed at all stages in Canada. It's moral collapse in my book when you end up thinking that abortion is better then adoption. I understand abortion can be preferable in very specific cases (rape, medical complications, psychological state of the mother, diseases, etc) but "after-birth" abortion? It's mental illness...

Martijn It depends on the definition of "after-birth". Is birth the moment we agree gestation is done? Or at the moment any cells are delivered from a womb? The term needs a definition before it can be discussed. "Doesn't life starts when fertilization occurs?" No. Biological life starts the moment a cell is active. I would personally argue human life starts the moment the brain can (and does) receive impulses through the nervous system. Prior to fertilisation both the ovum and sperm are active already. Can these be killed? At fertilisation is just the first point they form a zygote. Is a single zygote a human life though? I would say no.

☕ David Antoine You are right, sperm and ovum are active prior to fertilization but can they alone evolve? Adapt? Grow? Reproduce? Those are the characteristics I had in mind when I spoke about human life. I don't think an ovum or spermatozoid can be killed, they are not objectively living organism, they are cells and stay as that. But I do think that a single human zygote is a becoming human life you can kill and it begins at fertilization. That's the line I think. Any other "delimitation" step after that is subjective to me. You just pick-up what you want, nervous system, heart beating, gestation done, even God influx of soul, why not...