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Comment by davidcann | Hacker News Reader

As medical technology progresses, it seems obvious that abortion will eventually be seen as barbaric. A hundred years ago, a baby born prematurely would die, but now babies live when born at 7 months, 6 months? earlier? Laws in the US have begun to reflect this. The only logical limit is conception.

At some point, it will no longer be an issue of religion or freedom of the mother, just like wife-beating must have been the "right if a man."

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Conversely, contraception technology may progress to the point that accidental pregnancy itself becomes a quaint impossibility, sidestepping the moral issues altogether.

Not entirely. People change their mind.

So the question will be (and mainly already is): when is too late to change your mind?

I treat the abortion issue as a sorites paradox. You can't draw a line where human life begins, and if we are really serious about respecting it, then we shouldn't try to.

The only logical limit is conception.

If you accept conception as a logical limit, then you'll have to explain the relevant moral distinction between a human embryo and a fish embryo, besides that one can eventually become a person, given the right external conditions (an ovum can too).

I propose sentience as a logical limit, acquired I suspect late in pregnancy.

> The only logical limit is conception.

The future will see zygotes as people? Hopefully that particular future won't be uniformly distributed around the planet...

I don't know, but do you have a suggestion for another limit?

Since it's such a loaded subject, I'd want to consult the philosophy literature on the subject. I don't think I'd make a good choice without giving it a lot of thought.

With my bets hedged this way, my feeling is that the mere potentiality of the future existence of a person is not enough to condemn the abortion of undifferentiated clumps of cells.

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