So: what does it mean to be a viable human?
Capable of surviving on one’s own.
So: viability begins at approximately six years old.
That’s actually quite generous, too. I mean, maybe a little urban scavenging street-kid could (probably not) hack it… possibly a hunter-gatherer kid in a really gentle climactic environment, preferably on an island where there wouldn’t be so many large predators. And I’m not really at all confident in the street kid at 6 as far as our current society goes.
So if the child/fetus begins to gain some kind of “rights”counterbalancing the mother’s at the point of viability, that couldn’t *start* to happen any time before the 30th trimester. I mean, seriously, a newborn’s primary skills are screaming (sure to get it killed by a predator) and, well, nothing – since it can neither suck nor shit without being fed by someone else. It can breathe, for a while.
If Nature did not see fit to give it any kind of right to life (being born dead without extensive and continual intervention over a period of years), why should we?
Well, presumably, there are practical reasons. We don’t like people to engage in indifference to the needs of small children, since after all if everyone did that there’d be no one to pay our pensions or stand behind the counter to dispense the medications we’d be buying with them. And there’s probably someone who’s willing to take the thing in.
Nonetheless, there should not be any delusion that we do this because the child has a “right” to life; there is no such thing as a “right” to demand that others behave constantly and exhaustively for one’s own benefit over a period of many years. We may be *able* to do this and we may *choose* to do so; indeed, we may come to define ourselves as a people based on our excellence in caring for others.
But that is our right, not theirs. No one else has a right to my labor (pun intended).
