We left off last night asking: when does a fetus begin to command moral respect, such that we should view it as something other than a mere clump of cells appended to a woman’s body?
I have repeatedly noted AMac’s comment:
Sometime in the 2 to 4 month time frame, an embryo becomes recognizable as a pre-human, sharing many of the features that a human exhibits as a born baby.
I have argued why many Americans may reasonably decide that the moment of conception is too early to treat an embryo as a full human, and why the moment of viability is too late to treat a fetus as a mere clump of cells. I think most people can understand these arguments.
But in their quest for a bright line, some may be frustrated by the lack of specificity in the “2 to 4 month time frame.” Still, a bright line is not always necessary. In his essay which inspired this series of posts, James Q. Wilson makes an excellent point:
[L]ife in general is filled with circumstances in which the alternatives are not clearly defined. I cannot define twilight, but that does not mean that I cannot tell the difference between night and day. Our inability to draw a line should no more disable us from making moral judgments about a fetus than it prevents us from making such judgments about children or adults.
Though no line can be drawn, we can identify, I think, the rough stage in embryonic development when, if we are made unmistakably aware of it, our moral sentiments begin to be most powerfully engaged. People treat as human that which appears to be human; people treat as quasi-human that which appears quasi-human. Imagine a room on the walls of which are arrayed, in chronological order, exact color photographs of the human embryo, suitably enlarged, from first fertilization, through early cell divisions and implantation, through the emergence of various human, or humanlike, features, and on to the complete fetus the day before normal delivery. There would be 266 photographs in all, one for each day of embryonic or fetal development. Suppose we then ask a variety of people, but perhaps especially women, to examine these photographs and to tell us in which one, or in which small cluster of them, they first see what appears to be “a baby.” Having examined such pictures, most people, I speculate, would select those that represent life at around 7 to 9 weeks after conception.
Wilson suggests that motion pictures would be even more enlightening.
It would also be more powerful to actually see the fetuses. We did this last year, at the Prenatal Exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. But failing that, looking at photographs is better than nothing.
So let’s do it. Let’s look at actual pictures of babies in different phases of fetal development. They are in the extended entry. Then answer these questions:
1) When do you think a fetus begins to resemble a baby?
2) Do you think the answer to Question #1 is morally important?
By the way, these are not the jarring pictures of aborted fetuses that activists feature on their web sites, but rather (in my opinion) beautiful pictures of fetuses in the womb in various stages of development.
Most of the photos featured below were taken by a famous photographer named Lennart Nilsson, who is world-renowned for his pictures of fetuses in the womb. I have done my best to verify that the photos correspond to the correct stage of development; in most cases I saw the same photos appearing on multiple sites, not all of which were pro-life sites.
Of course, it would be good to know something about the actual development that is going on inside the fetus, in addition to simply looking at pictures. So I have chosen to include descriptions of fetal development taken from pregnancy-info.net. Feel free to skim this information if you are short on time.
Don’t feel limited by my pictures. If you are curious, surf the Web, check out books, and think about the question yourself. It’s an important one.
The pictures are in the extended entry:
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