If a fetus doesn't and has never felt or thought than how can he be considered a living,breathing, fully formed conscious, sentient being? Babies aren't even sentient for a long time. a Newborn knows nothing, it can only experience the world in the most primal sense through neurochemicals that make him feel better or worse. A fetus isn't even that, its less. The only value of a fetus is its future.
now we have a religious question, if a fetus dies, its "spirit"/non-physical entity does whatever the religion sasy it does (re-incarnate, go to heaven, etc.) so actually in most cases his spirit skips life and goes straight to what happens to spirits who haven't done anything bad in the real world. So its actually pretty good going for a fetus in the metaphysical world of pretty much any earthly religion from my view.
However to make this more fair, I am going to assume that there is nothing but physical existance (life as we call it.) If we were to weight a fetus's "value", it wouldn't have a score for present or past as it is merely a framework of skin and bone.So, a framework of human skin, bone and nails, is more valuable than any animal and some humans?
Well perhaps so if it has good future value. Now, while this factor is rarely accounted or cared for for in the real world and is hard to predict (you can give him some rough statistics dependant on the environment and genes he has.) If we accounted for future value as much in the real world ( eg: future value>present/past values,) then we would never care about the past or the present. We wouldn't try criminals who are "going to be good", we wouldn't read the bible or anything from history. So we would imprison a quarter of black people for an average amount of time, because 1 in 4 (or 5 maybe) are going to prison anyways? Are you seriously going to value the future so highly on but a single thing in this universe?
A thing that has never existed and isn't existing can't really be killed... Although, I would consider that stopping something from the chance of existing is killing.
(I didn't just switch sides or was on any, I was just trying to some rhetoric to see every viewpoint on abortion which is an example of the question I asked in the title. I consider abortion killing but I value living people and most living mammals far more than a fetus...)
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