Another Circumcision thread

[The Grand Nudger]

Personhood may be a legal term, that's not all it is, though. Personhood may also be used outside of its legal connotation to be discussed as an idea, whether casually or philosophically. Come on now, seriously?

You can use it in any sense that you like, but using it in some other sense can't speak to the legal sense....in fact, you're not even talking -about- the same thing...which is where and why the problem of drawing inference between two disparate meanings of the word begins.  

Well, ok, then, about the abortion debate. Thanks for educating me, I guess.

Do I find it a little hard to believe that we can already tell when a fetus' brain becomes sufficiently developed for us to be able to distinguish it from other life forms in some significant way that is to pave the way to it becoming a human?(- Yes, I do) Otherwise, what is, in your mind, the difference between killing an unthinking animal and an unthinking human, whether in womb or otherwise?

It's not about it becoming human.  It's about it becoming conscious.  There's no doubt that a fetus in the first trimester isn't conscious.  There's some doubt that even a newborn is fully conscious.  

We might be getting off-topic with this, but I find it a good topic to talk about. Just as long as we can all agree that just because there are already laws concerning all of these things, doesn't mean our discussion about them should be confined, intellectually, within those limits as set by those laws(i.e. personhood starts at birth, so says my government, now stop talking about it).

No ones trying to confine a conversation.  Your means of inference was not valid because you did not -address- that to which you objected.  Now, if you wanted to make the argument that personhood should be granted to a fetus, fine....but "it's gonna be a human one day" won't do that either.  Again, a fertilized egg, day one, will become a human (that's the life begins at conception route), and even a 17 year old doesn't get full personhood...despite having "already become a human". Long story short, that end of it is pretty fuckin complicated...but isn't seen as the most compelling interest in the case of abortion in any case. To bar the mother from aborting is to use the power of the state to sentence her to carry the child to term. At which point she could abandon the child to our foster care system...or be further sentenced to motherhood.

None of these outcomes are actually positively weighted. We don't think that abortion is "good". We don't think that piles of orphans are "good". We don't think that sentencing someone to motherhood is "good". We do think that the last two are worse than the first. By we I only mean our laws, our courts, our system.

(doesn't really matter if we derail, btw, we've already determined that the circumcision issue is one where people either don't give a shit, or believe weird things about circumcision that they're just going to act on anyway, that sort of shit is intractable,lol)