Bioethicists: Unborn baby is merely a “Gestator’s” body part.

I guess like an appendix… Thanks to EM for sending me this. I’ve excerpted only part so hit the top link for the entire thing.

The article is by the great Wesley J, Smith.

Nothing in the editorial is surprising.

But I was rather astounded to recently learn that some pro-abortion bioethicists now deploy the obscure philosophical field of “mereology” — which explores the relationship between parts and wholes — to argue unscientifically that the gestating baby is actually merely a “part” of the woman’s body:

Recently, Kingma has argued that, contrary to popular belief, the fetus is not merely contained by the gestator’s body but a part of it. This is a metaphysical claim which is grounded by scientific facts about pregnancy. [Citations omitted.]

The article explores “the metaphysics of pregnancy,” meaning that with this discussion, we have left the scientific realm. Moreover, unlike the metaphysical claim that the unborn child has a soul — which, whether true, does not impact the scientific facts of pregnancy — applying the theory of mereology to the reality of fetal existence has the potential to ignore biological reality:

When thinking about whether the analogy with the bun and the oven is reasonable, Kingma argues that it is actually quite preposterous: ‘We cannot take ‘the bun out of the oven’, check it and stick it back in if it is not fully cooked. (If only!) Birth is irreversible: once a baby is out, it does not go back in — ever’. Given that it fails to satisfy Smith and Brogaard’s criteria for being a separate entity, Kingma concludes that one ought to consider the fetus as a part of the gestator’s body. She calls this the Parthood View of pregnancy.

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Please understand that this ongoing debate, which is mostly taking place in ivory tower obscurity, is acutely relevant to future abortion public policy. Indeed, if the medical and bioethics elite ever reach a consensus that a fetus is merely a body part — like, say, an appendix — and not an individual living organism, that view (follow the metaphysics!) will be incorporated into public policy obliterating the regulation of abortion in any regard whatsoever.