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Concept
Beginning of human personhood
Summary
The beginning of human personhood is the moment when a human is first recognized as a person. There are differences of opinion as to the precise time when human personhood begins and the nature of that status. The issue arises in a number of fields including science, religion, philosophy, and law, and is most acute in debates relating to abortion, stem cell research, reproductive rights, and fetal rights.
Traditionally, the concept of personhood has entailed the concept of soul, a metaphysical concept referring to a non-corporeal or extra-corporeal dimension of human being. In modernity, the concepts of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, personhood, mind, and self have come to encompass a number of aspects of human being previously considered to be characteristics of the soul. With regard to the beginning of human personhood, one historical question has been when the soul enters the body. In modern terms, the question could be put instead at what point the developing individual develops personhood or selfhood.
Related issues attached to the question of the beginning of human personhood include both the legal status, bodily integrity, and subjectivity of mothers, as well as the philosophical concept of "natality", i.e. "the distinctively human capacity to initiate a new beginning", which a new human life embodies.
Fertilization is the fusing of the gametes, that is a sperm cell and an ovum (egg cell), to form a zygote. At this point, the zygote is genetically distinct from either of its parents.
Fertilization was not understood in ancient times. Hippocrates believed that the embryo was the product of male semen and a female factor. But Aristotle held that only male semen gave rise to an embryo, while the female only provided a place for the embryo to develop, (a concept he acquired from the preformationist Pythagoras). In 1651 William Harvey refuted Aristotle's idea that menstrual blood could be involved in the formation of a fetus, asserting that eggs from the female were somehow caused to become a fetus as a result of sexual intercourse.
Official source
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