It doesn’t matter to me that a fetus at a stage capable of being aborted is not developed enough to be considered“viable” on its own. Neither is a premature baby, but nobody’s suggesting that it should be permissible to take an axe to a ward of preemies in their incubators.

For that matter, even a healthy full-term baby is far from independently “viable.” For its most basic survival, any baby is utterly dependent on an extraordinary amount of care from its parents or other caregivers.

The advance of technology enabling fetuses to be supported outside their mothers at earlier and earlier points in their development poses additional problems for the “viability” argument. If current technology enables a fetus to survive outside the womb at point X, and we know that the technology is constantly improving, does it even make any administrative sense to formulate a law or policy enabling the life of a fetus to be snuffed out at X minus a day? 

In the final analysis, I feel that the whole “viability” issue is a slippery slope that it simply makes no sense to venture down.

If we want to know the point when a human being comes into existence, we already have a clear and indisputable one that has been handed down to us through the centuries:   the point of conception.  

Moreover, modern studies of genetics and DNA have only reinforced that this is the point where an individual human identity comes into being. Even with all the wonders that future science may reveal, can we really hope to get a clearer and more logical point to describe when a human life begins?