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Is a fetus a corporeal component of the gravida?

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leejosepho
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21 Nov 2009, 7:27 am

anna-banana wrote:
iamnotaparakeet wrote:
leejosepho wrote:
It is interesting that "mother" and "foetus" appear together there rather than mother-child or host-foetus ... but that is another matter.


Actually, the term "gravida" is the medical term for a pregnant woman, which should be used along with the medical term "fetus" if fetus is to be used.


how about host-parasite? :P


0_equals_true wrote:
This is actually quite an easy question to answer based on common knowledge.

Gestation cannot occur without the environment, and chemical (natural or artificial). So the baby is neither an independent being nor a parasite. You might say it is most like a colony animal, except the mother isn't really interdependent like the baby. But frankly it is what it is: a foetus. It does not develop on its own.


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leejosepho
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21 Nov 2009, 7:45 am

DentArthurDent wrote:
You stated that birth was merely a change in location. By describing it so you are dismissing the major change that has just occurred, one from being a foetus to an independent living human baby. This suggests that you regard a foetus as a fully viable human which it clearly is not. I am not making innuendo i am merely reading what you have written


It is your occasional choice of adjective that grates me, but I do realize my own responsibility for possibly trying to hear them less offensively. And along with that, I do apologize for occasionally confusing things at times by making statements that might really convey nothing beyond my general ignorance of all the related terms and their most-proper or -accurate usages.

A foetus is certainly not a "fully-viable human", yet "it" nevertheless is one ... and it is in that light that I say the mother's eventual deliver of "it" is merely a change of location. The fact that the human foetus is circumstantially out-of-sight and that we cannot naturally identify "it" as either a "him" or a "her" while "it" yet remains in the womb does not make "it" anything less than the human foetus "it" actually is.


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leejosepho
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21 Nov 2009, 6:56 pm

DentArthurDent wrote:
You stated that birth was merely a change in location. By describing it so you are dismissing the major change that has just occurred, one from being a foetus to an independent living human baby ...


If I can get this picture attached, I would just like to add something more to the idea of a mother's responsibility toward the child within ...

This is a picture of my older daughter blowing my oldest granddaughter's first breath into her ...

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/TZ ... directlink

Edit: Can somebody show me how to add the actual picture to this post?


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Fuzzy
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21 Nov 2009, 7:37 pm

I dont have the womb for this conversation in my life.

One problem leejosepho and dent, is that the dependency doesnt suddenly end. A baby born a week early has almost every certainty of survival. A newborn is dependant on its mother, though a surrogate may take her place.

That being said, there is another situation that addresses this issue, and its much more divisive. iamnotaparakeet, have you ever heard of a human chimera or a mosaic human?

Its when two developing foetuses fuse, and unlike a siamese twin, they become one properly formed body.

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=412

So does that person have two souls? Two minds? One person or two?


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DentArthurDent
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22 Nov 2009, 3:19 am

Fuzzy I fully get the complexities of pregnancy. I just get annoyed by the simplistic christian view of the matter.


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LiberalJustice
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22 Nov 2009, 3:53 am

Yes, if a fetus is in a woman's body, then it is a component of such until birth.


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22 Nov 2009, 7:46 pm

0_equals_true wrote:
But frankly it is what it is: a foetus.

Agreed, most of the time, a fetus is just a fetus.


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