Should this baby legally be a person? If so, when should he become one and why?

Consider the following five questions:

1. Is it OK to kill a one day old baby?

2. Is it OK to kill a baby a few seconds after birth?

3. Is it OK to kill a baby in the process of birth (partially outside but partially inside the birth canal)?

4. Is it OK to kill a baby a few seconds before birth?

5. Is it OK to kill a baby one day before birth?

To my first two questions, most people would answer no. Not only is it wrong, it is absolutely horrific, a cruel murder of one of the most innocent and vulnerable members of society.

However, in Canada, a human legally becomes a person the moment he or she is fully out of the birth canal. This means to questions 3–5, Canadian law and abortion advocates answer yes. As long as at least a toe is still in the birth canal, there is absolutely nothing wrong with killing the baby, and anyone who dares to say otherwise is a misogynistic bigot who wants to control and oppress women.

But what’s the difference between 2 and 3? Some abortion advocates respond by saying that this scenario of late-term/partial-birth abortion happens only very rarely. However, how frequently something happens does not determine whether it’s moral. You can’t say, ‘I only very, very rarely murder people, so it doesn’t matter.’

Thus, we need to decide what exactly happens in that one second that changes the act of killing from a horrific murder of an innocent newborn baby to a morally neutral abortion.

Is it that the physical location of the child changes from inside the body to outside? The baby is inside the pregnant mother’s body, but is not part of her body. To argue otherwise is to deny basic science. We know that the unborn child is a completely separate person with their own unique DNA. If a women is pregnant with a male child, do we say she has four arms and legs and a penis? Of course not, because those extra body parts are her child’s, not her’s.

Just because our body is an extremely intimate and personal space doesn’t mean that we have the right to kill another person inside it. Our house is something intimate and personal that we fully own. We have the right to do what we want to our house, but we do not have the right to kill our kids inside our house.

So maybe what changes is dependency? After all, an unborn child is fully dependent on her mother for all needs of life and cannot exist without her. But this does not change at birth. The newborn will die within a few days (or much earlier) if abandoned, and continues to remain almost completely dependent on the mother for more than a year. Similarly, many people cannot live without being sustained by medical equipment. Yet we don’t give the government or doctors the right to kill those people because those people depend on them, just like we don’t give mothers the right to kill babies that depend on them.

So maybe we need abortion because pregnancy can be extremely difficult, exhausting, and painful for the pregnant woman? It is certainly true that pregnancy is extremely difficult, but so is raising a child. A mother raising a newborn can experience enormous exhaustion, sleep deprivation, unceasing crying and wailing, constantly being woken up in the middle of the night, and much more. But if this proves to be too much for her to handle, is it moral for her to kill her child?

Likewise, pregnancy can be an enormous financial burden and interfere with a career. But what if a woman is dumped by her boyfriend, loses her job, and finds herself completely alone with no money and an enormous amount of debt a day after giving birth? Does this mean that she should kill her newborn daughter? Of course not. However, if she’s unable to take care of her herself, she could give her up for adoption to a loving family that can. If this same scenario occurs a day before birth, how is it any different?

So, the difference in killing a child a second after birth and a second before birth? Two seconds. Morally, the acts are equivalent. Assigning personhood the moment the baby is fully out of the birth canal is a completely arbitrary choice, and can just as easily be changed to any other point of time in the child’s life, such as the time before birth when the unborn child’s heart first starts beating, or the time after birth when the infant takes his or her first steps or says his or her first words.

People can advocate for abortion and they can advocate for infanticide. But they cannot do one without the other.