Then we're in agreement that Fetal personhood needs to be an article. I disagree with Skyring's claim that NPOV policy and NPOV terminology should be left to each article. As physical science has rational bearing on issues regarding the concept of universe, so does medical science have a bearing on all medical issues. The view that NPOV rel. rationality rel. science, and POV rel. irrationality rel. claim/belief is not a controversial interpretation of NPOV, IMHO.
Hence we can feel free to state a dominant consensus that at some certain point, a fetus is a human life, and hence marginalize both extreme absolutist views which claim either that "human life begins at conception" or that the issue is entirely "in the domain of woman's choice [until its feet are out]."
Sinreg, SV
PS starting progress on: consolidating issues to Template:Abortion
--- Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
This is a pretty complex question to sum up easily, and there's a huge body of writing on it from all sides (not just political advocates either; there's a huge body of literature in applied-ethics philosophy journals). Some opinions agree that it's a "human life" but argue that "human rights" is a misnomer and ought to be "personhood rights", and not granted automatically to humans but only to persons; others dispute that a fetus is "human" in the sense that the term is generally meant, and instead will only grant it is "of the species homo sapiens" or something similar. There is a whole *other* body of literature on what exactly "personhood" is and means, and once you've established that, still another body of literature on what sort of ethics ought to apply to people who have been deemed "persons" in the relevant sense (fifty flavors of utilitarians, Kantians, and all the rest).
Basically there's nothing Wikipedia can say about this subject that has a consensus anywhere, other than some very basic medical facts like "a fetus is genetically of the species homo sapiens". There is, however, a lot of stuff other people say about it that would be nice to summarize.
-Mark
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