Birth is the transition from the prenatal (German) to the postnatal phase of a human person. It is a decisive event in the life of the human being — physiologically, socially, biographically — but it does not change the ontological status of the person.
Ontological Position
The personal ontology represented here maintains: the person exists from fertilization (the fusion of gametes) onward as a person with full ontological dignity. Birth adds nothing to personhood that was not already there before — it is a transition of phase, not a change of status.
The argument draws together three lines:
1. Substance-ontological identity. Before and after birth it is the same human person. Were birth an ontological change of status, a new substance would have to come into being in birth — which the biological continuity (the same DNA, the same bodily identity, uninterrupted vital activity) does not support.
2. Negation of the functionalist solution. Functionalist concepts of person (Locke, Singer, Tooley) attempt to fasten personhood to actual capacities — self-consciousness, the capacity for sensation, preferences. These solutions shift the change of status to a later point in time (birth, the first year of life, the second year of life). But they fail because the actualization of a capacity presupposes its ontological anchoring in the person — it is the active potency (German) that constitutes personhood, not its contingent actualization. Cf. empirical-functionalist concept of person.
3. Consequence for bioethics. From ontological identity it follows that all interventions that end the life of the person in the prenatal phase — abortion, the discarding of surplus embryos, preimplantation diagnosis (German) with selective discarding — have, on substance-ontological grounds, the same quality as interventions in the postnatal phase. Birth is no morally relevant threshold at which the dignity of the person first begins.
Phenomenology of Birth
What changes in birth — if not the ontological status?
- Physiologically: the transition from intrauterine sustenance (placenta, amniotic fluid, maternal respiration) to independent respiration, the reorganization of circulation, an independent metabolism.
- Socially: the becoming-visible of the person for an enlarged community. What until then only the mother, the father, and the closest relatives (and, via sonography, also physicians) could perceive, enters the intersubjective space.
- Biographically: with birth most cultures begin to count age. That is a convention, not an ontological finding.
Personal ontology takes these changes seriously without ontologizing them. Birth is an event of high human significance without being a change of status.
Bioethical Consequences
- Abortion: on substance-ontological grounds, at every stage of pregnancy the killing of a person; cf. abortion and Evangelium vitae 58 (John Paul II 1995).
- Late abortion versus premature birth: the same being — the nearly mature fetus — is in one clinic given intensive-care medical treatment and in another aborted. The difference lies not in the being of the being, but in the external situation and decision.
- Live birth after late abortion: according to the relevant statistics of the WHO and of individual countries, cases occur annually in which children are born alive after a late abortion. The ontology represented here sees these children as what they are — living persons with all rights.
Ontological Classification
Superordinate concept: event (transition of phase)
Relations:
- marks the transition from: prenatal phase (German) to postnatal phase
- does NOT change: personhood, ontological dignity, right to life
- presupposed by: fetal phase (as endpoint)
Chapter assignment: Chapter 4: What Is Human Personhood? (German)
Sources
- John Paul II (1995): Evangelium vitae, nos. 58–63. The magisterial anchoring of ontological identity from fertilization onward.
- Spaemann, Robert: Persons. The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’, transl. Oliver O’Donovan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. The argument from diachronic identity.
- Seifert, Josef (1976): Was ist und was motiviert eine sittliche Handlung?. Salzburg/Munich: Universitätsverlag Anton Pustet (German). (Inaugural lecture at the University of Salzburg.)
See also
- Fertilization
- Prenatal Phase (German)
- Embryonic Phase (German)
- Fetal Phase
- Personhood
- Ontological Dignity
- Abortion
Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.