Put the limit at 21-22 weeks and that would be my ideal position.
As well as the consensus in most European countries.
I'm curious, would you support putting it earlier if technological advances continued to push the time of viability-with-medical-intervention earlier? Genuine question.
That's a tough question. On the one hand, viability with medical intervention could actually be an argument
for allowing the termination of pregnancy, since it means that this can be done without ending the fetus' life. On the other hand, of course, I can imagine that the procedures involved might cause long-term harm, and, more horrifyingly than anything else, might be considered "too expensive" to be performed systematically (those are all conjectures - I admit I know very little about the medical issues surrounding pregnancy).
In this case, I assume the pro-life argument would be that since the fetus
can (at least theoretically) survive without a mother, it should have the same right to life (and to avoid permanent non-lethal harm) as any other human being who can survive with medical assistance but wouldn't on its own. Is that correct?
I must say that this is not an argument I find very appealing. Even knowing that we can't avoid using a biological criterion as a basis for defining personhood (something which I'll never be happy with at a theoretical level), the ability to survive independently from the mother is one I find particularly unpleasant to consider. It seems to imply that humanity is defined by some measure of "self-sufficiency" (as partial as it might be). I find that philosophically unsavory. And beyond that, there's something seriously sketchy about a definition of personhood that relies on factors entirely independent from the would-be person. What makes a person a person must be the same in 2070 as it was in 1970.
I'm still a lot more comfortable with definitions based on cognitive capacities, such as the ability to feel pain. I would still say that even if viability was the latter point in time.
