Consider The Fetus
The title of this entry is a paraphrase of the title of David Foster Wallace's article 'Consider The Lobster' published in Gourmet Magazine. They don't seem to have the essay on their site, but there is an interesting article about it on The Boston Globe's website. In a similar spirit (but without footnotes) I would like to question the assumptions of those who wish to legislate against abortion. It strikes me that part of the problem with the whole abortion question is the lack of scientific answers to the core questions in the debate. To date we have not yet figured out what consciousness is, nor do we know how to determine whether or not a creature lacking language skill is or is not conscious. We have this strong intuition that there is some continuum from single-cell creatures up to higher primates, but can't assert with any certainty whether we really are more advanced than some number of our fellow creatures here on earth. In fact, it is unclear that attaining consciousness really does make us more advanced. Bruce Sterling has posited in some of his writing that hive minds could actually be more advanced than individual consciousness. So while we have some understanding about what makes one physically homo sapiens we have no clear definition for what makes one human.
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