Instigator / Pro
0
1443
rating
11
debates
22.73%
won
Topic
#1538

A fetus is not part of the mother’s body

Status
Finished

The debate is finished. The distribution of the voting points and the winner are presented below.

Winner & statistics
Better arguments
0
12
Better sources
0
8
Better legibility
0
4
Better conduct
0
4

After 4 votes and with 28 points ahead, the winner is...

RationalMadman
Parameters
Publication date
Last updated date
Type
Standard
Number of rounds
4
Time for argument
Two days
Max argument characters
10,000
Voting period
Two weeks
Point system
Multiple criterions
Voting system
Open
Contender / Con
28
1697
rating
556
debates
68.17%
won
Description

A fetus is not part of the mother’s body.
1. In 49% of cases (boy), how can it be part of her body if it is a different sex.
2. How can it be part of her if it has a different blood type, DNA, and genetic makeup.
3. Do pregnant women now have 4 hands and feet, 20 fingers and toes, and male genitalia (if it’s a boy).
4. If the baby is inside you doesn’t mean it’s part of you. If your in a car does it mean you are part of your car.

Round 1
Pro
#1
A fetus is not part of the mother’s body. 
1. In 49% of cases (boy), how can it be part of her body if it is a different sex.
2. How can it be part of her if it has a different blood type, DNA, and genetic makeup. 
3. Do pregnant women now have 4 hands and feet, 20 fingers and toes, and male genitalia (if it’s a boy).
4. If the baby is inside you doesn’t mean it’s part of you. If your in a car does it mean you are part of your car.

Con
#2
I spell it foetus, I will not spell it as 'fetus' to please Americans. 'Fetus' is actually correctly said as 'feotus' essentially. So, while 'foetus' has the 'o' and 'e' backwards, it is also wrong to eliminate the 'o'. If you correctly pronounce it, it is said 'fiiotus' with the 'o' pornounced very fast and transitioned smoothly into the next syllable. The American 'feeduz' is wrong. The American dialects who pronounce it 'feeoduhz' are the more correct ones but it's fiiotus in its true form of being said and that will be that.

==

The Elimination of Doubt

Let us first eliminate doubt regarding the capacity for the foetus to be a 'part' of something while being living, conscious and a separate entity in terms of experiencing reality. 

There are two totally different ways to handle this, I am going to us both, which do contradict each other, and blackmail Pro into proving one true in order to disprove the other.

Angle 1: Conscious humans are parts of teams, corporations, families, units etc. Conscious entities that are entirely sentient and 'individual' are still able to be parts of things. This eliminates any and all doubt that the foetus can be a part of the mother through to birth.

Angle 2: The arm, foot, even handbag and house that the mother may own, are all semantically parts of her. The finger indeed has a different experience to the mother, that because the cells in her blood, flesh, bones brain (which are all different versions of a cell and actually the entire group of cells you're born with are dead by the time you're six months old, with the regeneration slowing as you age but remaining very rapid until puberty is over in your lifespan). You want to tell me that all these 'parts' of the mother are to be disregarded because they don't have her exact experience of reality or don't equal the whole? Is her arm's bone a woman? No. Neither is her eyelid. It's an entity that has living cells and is a part of her because society deems it to be her property and directly related to her personhood.

Either Pro must agree to Angle 1, in order to fight Angle 2, or vice versa. The sentience of the being or the arbitrary societal application of 'part' to the foetus and the mother's uterus owning, encasing and harboring it, all can be considered ways to deem it part of her, though one does somewhat discredit the other.

==

But it's a parasite, I tell thee! Oh the foetus is feeding off the mother it cannot be a part of her, it's a male 49% of the time apparently!

Why, it's funny you say that, a parasite is an unwanted part of the body while inside it. Much like a right-winger hates a parasite abusing the generous welfare system and putting in no work to society in return, a left-winger loathes a fat-cat Aristocrat sitting on their millions and letting it inflate via interest rate and hiring the best stockbroker firms to make them richer, simply by being hired and wise with investments on behalf of the rich gentleman/lady/genderfluid. Both are examples of a part of the community, a definite member of society, being a parasite to it. Similarly, if we are to see that an entire plan can fall apart because one part of it ruins the rest of it, perhaps like a leak in your finance draining the rest of the company's profit margin by an erroneous part of the plan that lacked foresight, we are to understand that a parasite is indeed part of what it is leeching.

Do not be confused, though, there is a two-way parasitism going on. Many don't know this but the mother drains the foetus of immune system in order to defend her body against disease so that it never reaches the foetus in the first place (white blood cell leeching while pumping the foetus full of red blood cells and plasma in return). It also has been known to have a consistent improvement in brain alertness and anticipation of danger (not 'fear' actual foreseeing of what can go wrong in situations) which is a strategic form of intelligence. If you fully go through the pregnancy, it actually lasts approximately 2 years.

Fetal cells may do more than simply migrate to maternal tissues. The authors suggest they can act as a sort of placenta outside the womb, redirecting essential assets from the maternal body to the developing fetus. Cells derived from the fetus — which can persist in maternal tissues for decades after a child is born — have been associated with both protection and increased susceptibility to a range of afflictions, including cancer and autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis.

But, as co-author Wilson Sayres, cautions, “it’s not only a tug of war between maternal and fetal interests. There is also a mutual desire for the maternal system to survive and provide nutrients and for the fetal system to survive and pass on DNA.” 

If some degree of fetal microchimerism exerts a beneficial effect on maternal and offspring survival, it will likely be selected by evolution as an adaptive strategy.

A review of existing data on fetal microchimerism and health suggests that fetal cells enter a cooperative relationship in some maternal tissues, compete for resources in other tissues and may exist as neutral entities — hitchhikers simply along for the ride. It is likely that fetal cells play each of these roles at various times.

For example, fetal cells may contribute to inflammatory responses and autoimmunity in the mother, when they are recognized as foreign entities by the maternal immune system. This may account in part for higher rates of autoimmunity in women. (Women have three times higher rates of rheumatoid arthritis, compared with men.)

Fetal cells can also provide benefits to mothers, migrating to damaged tissue and repairing it. Their presence in wounds — including cesarean incisions — points to their active participation in healing. In other cases, fetal cells from the placenta are swept through the bloodstream into areas including the lungs, where they may persist merely as bystanders.
- Harth, R. (2015). Fetal cells influence mom's health during pregnancy — and long after. [online] ASU Now: Access, Excellence, Impact. Available at: https://asunow.asu.edu/content/fetal-cells-influence-moms-health-during-pregnancy-%E2%80%94-and-long-after [Accessed 14 Oct. 2019].

Hoekzema and her colleagues set out to change that. Working in Spain, in affiliation with the Autonomous University of Barcelona, they used MRI scanning to examine the brains of 25 women who had never had children, both before they became pregnant and again from 3 weeks to a few months after they gave birth. The team also scanned 19 first-time fathers at the same intervals, 17 men without children, and 20 women without children who did not become pregnant during the study. Then, they used computer-based analyses to measure changes in gray matter volume.

The findings showed highly consistent gray matter volume losses in the mothers and not in the other groups, the team reports today in Nature Neuroscience. The changes occurred primarily in areas of the brain involved in social tasks like reading the desires and intentions of others from their faces and actions. The hippocampus, a region associated with memory, also lost volume. What’s more, the team found that the mothers’ scores on a standard test that gauges the degree of a mom’s attachment to her infant could be predicted to a significant degree based on the changes in their gray matter volume during pregnancy.

The scientists also used MRI scans to watch the women’s brains work in real time, as they looked at photos of their own infants and of other babies. Several of the brain areas that had lost gray matter during pregnancy responded with the strongest neural activity to their own babies as opposed to the photos of other infants.(Comparisons between the brain’s response to photos of a mother’s own infant and to photos of other infants is a common measure researchers use to gauge neural responses to babies.)
Two years later, 11 of the 25 mothers—those who had not become pregnant again—returned for MRI scans. The scans showed that gray matter loss remained—except in the hippocampus, where most volume had been restored. The changes were so consistent that a computer algorithm could predict with 100% accuracy whether a woman had been pregnant from her MRI scan.
- Wadman, M. (2016). Pregnancy resculpts women’s brains for at least 2 years. [online] Science | AAAS. Available at: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/12/pregnancy-resculpts-women-s-brains-least-2-years [Accessed 14 Oct. 2019].



Round 2
Pro
#3
Forfeited
Con
#4
Any and all scientific reasons (such as that if the mother dies, the foetus will die very rapidly too) and such are all only defensive points that I need to raise if Pro raises scientific hints as to the foetus' independence from the mother. The Foetus is an entirely dependent being on the mother and the mother invest extreme amounts into the foetus (arguably risking more on it than any other body part, sacrificing grey matter in her brain to nurture it). In return, the foetus gives some protection, but later on the very way it helped her immune system can turn into autoimmune disease where her body begins attacking itself, so it's overall a sacrifice for the mother, I'm not disagree with Pro on that. 

The mother gives a lot to the foetus, more so than to the rest of her body's invidual limbs, organs etc. The foetus is considered extremely essential to the mother, physically while it's being nurtured. It is ridiculous to bring up the 'not her DNA' angle, in my eyes, for it is the very fact that it is her DNA that is why natural selection favoured women who truly did treat the foetus as a full fledged part of themselves (because mothers who in any physical way didn't properly give the foetus nutrition etc, clearly would produce either stillbirths or weak offspring that were less likely to reproduce).

Pro's core case is that it's an error that the mother's body considers the foetus a part of itself, but I argue that the very fact that both her body and society consider it so make it as valid a part of her body as a limb or some physical extension of herself, like hair, at the very least.
Round 3
Pro
#5
Forfeited
Con
#6
mhmm.
Round 4
Pro
#7
Forfeited
Con
#8
I am sexy