Abortion: Part 1. When does life begin?
During the time of Socrates he taught that a person did not yet posses a human soul until some time between the ages of 6-9 months (Socrates suggested that males were imparted with a soul at 6 months and females at 9). For Socrates, before this time of “insoulment”, where a soul was imparted to human children thy held in their possession a soul, more or less similar to a plant and then later an animal as the child grew closer to the age of what constituted “full humanity”. Like most people today I would have to disagree with the great Socrates in this case. No such evidence exists today which would make this view viable to any intelligent person. So when does a person become fully human? When is a soul imparted?
In a world where basically everyone I know believes in a “soul” this question can have huge implication on issues such as abortion. In the interest of revealing my own bias, my personal opinion is that a soul can never be separated from a person; that the two are indivisible. I believe that a life has been formed from the first minute of conception. My evidence…as soon as the egg is fertilized, replication of cells begins, the organic organism initiates metabolism, and so life begins. This is, I might add, the dictionary definition of “life” as we know it.
Unlike Socrates and his modern equivalents who suggest that a soul develops much like an early form of puberty, I cannot image a human baby having anything less than a human soul at the instant of its establishment. By our own scientific definition the organism growing within an impregnated woman is alive from the very point of conception. The next question of course is this – what classification of life is this? Is it as Socrates suggested a form of plant life or animal life? It is an interesting question, not because it is difficult but rather because it is so simple to answer. The life growing within a pregnant human being is of course, a human life.
