Abortion and Defining Humanity
Cardiac activity in women and other apparent myths.
If the leaked Supreme Court decision is to be believed Roe v. Wade is about to be overturned calling into question the very human rights of women in America. The question called here is not — as Alito tries to state in the very first sentence — whether or not abortion is moral; it’s whether or not women should be considered as human beings. Scientifically, this is an absurdly easy question to answer. Women are Homo sapiens. They’re (we’re) human. End of story. It’s not even a moral question as Alito suggests because if we are talking about philosophical subjects like the creation of the soul or autonomy of the mind then an adult woman has that, a girl old enough for this to be an applicable argument may not have fully achieved the neurological portion of that just yet (she clearly has a soul, but if we’re talking about brain development then yes human brains are not fully mature until their mid-twenties), but will in a few years time, but a foetus or zygote absolutely has not. Even if you try to argue that a foetus has a soul — and I think that’s an incredibly dubious argument — you have to accept that the uterus carrying said foetus is attached to an actual human being who definitely unarguably has a soul.
