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Comment by Jason_Protell | Hacker News Reader

That second "fact" is not a fact. Baby is the term we use to describe children soon after they are born. Did you mean fetus?

Fertilized eggs have the potential to become fetuses, and fetuses have the potential to become babies, but fertilized eggs are not fetuses, and fetuses are not babies.

I think the spirit of your argument is that we cannot decide when to call a fetus a human. Like I mentioned in another comment, this grey area does not preclude undisputed humans from their constitutional rights.

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279 days into a pregnancy, the baby can survive fine outside the mother's womb. If it's born the next day, nothing physically changes about the baby whether it's inside the womb or outside. It's literally a baby. Yet in roughly half of the liberal states, it's perfectly legal to kill that baby for any reason while it's inside, but the next minute when it's outside you'd get life in prison for killing it. How is that logically consistent?

What methods are there of killing an unborn baby a day before it would otherwise be born that wouldn't cause massive harm to the mother? What examples of this actually occurring do you know of? Personally I agree that ethically, intentionally killing the foetus/baby just before birth is not significantly different to doing so just after birth. But it doesn't mean the same legal protections make sense, given the very practical differences between either act. Perhaps the only scenario where they're not so different is where the mother is already dead. That we might need laws against anyone actively killing an unborn baby in such a case (given they'd obviously require active intervention to survive more than a few minutes) seems a little farfetched.

First, you can't call a fetus a baby just because it can become a baby. (Just as you can't call a child an adult just because it has the potential to become an adult.)

Second, pregnancy varies from person to person. You can't reasonably assume that all fetuses that are 279 days old will survive and become healthy babies.

Third, there are substantial physical differences between fetuses and babies. I'm sure you're aware that fetuses receive most of their nutrients through the umbilical cord, whereas babies do not.

Maybe I'm wrong and you're right, maybe "nothing physically changes about the baby whether it's inside the womb or outside." Let's test this hypothesis. Go feed a baby through its belly button and see how that works out.

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