How much is enough time to decide?
I ask because while biology is quite firm in its measurement of 12 weeks gestation, humans vary considerably in when probative awareness of pregnancy happens.
Some women are like atomic clocks, if they are 1 second late ... they are pregnant.
Others are highly irregular, skip months all the time, don't get sick, get on a plane to Bermuda, think the sun is hotter than usual, go home, study for finals, feel tired and whallah, biologically they are into double digits (weeks-wise). It is uncommon, even rare, but where is the line so drawn.
It seems one needs to follow an order of events (if they are inclined to impose a time-limit) where one determines legally what constitutes enough time, somehow formulates when effectively all of the population would be aware, and then adds that time.
And of course there is the whole thing of children (pregnant children), genetic screening and so on and to what degree one maintains personal liberty in he context of these matters or is otherwise instructed that they have had enough time.
While the morality of affording live births full rights while an unborn fetus has none is by no means comfortable, I pretty much go with the viability argument. While live birth certainly does not define independence, it does much more so than, say, a "heartbeat".
As ARK seems to be using the heartbeat criteria, and having grown plenty of stems cells that spontaneously differentiate into "heart" cells owing to the fact that they are beating in the petrie dish, I am disinclined to recognize a heartbeat as a valuable metric. A heartbeat is more of a literary tool than a biological one in this case.
I certainly think killing is unfortunate, and usually bad, but I am uncertain if we are ever to separate ourselves from it. We do it in war, in prisons, in food distribution policies, through gun laws, in allowing the construction and use of automobiles and so on. We allow roads to be built next to schools that allow normal traffic, we recommend versus require all sorts of safety things, we allow parental control of vaccine policy in households and all of these things in aggregate kill. Reliably. Determinably. Given the variety of situations that can lead to pregnancy and the disproportionate burden placed on one gender, I am inclined to allow this killing.
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