The creation of human beings in God’s image implies that humans should live with each other through a mutual relationship of care and love. Imago Dei or the image of God forms the basis of human dignity in Christianity. For people in the medical profession, the term moral status implies the provision of care through caring for the sick. This practice stems from the fact that humans are beings with a soul that is spiritual by nature (Gilabert, 2018). The spirituality of the human soul forces practitioners to craft treatment plans that consider the spiritual reality of the human soul. If people in the medical profession perceived humans only as physical beings, treatment plans would only revolve around the physical body. However, in normal practice, every nurse already knows that human beings constitute more than just the physical body.
There are numerous worldviews of what a human being is. Some people believe that God gave humans a higher value which automatically raises man’s standing before God and other creations. Other people simply believe that humans were catapulted to the top of the chain based on their physical nature and their intelligence. For those who believe in God, understanding God’s nature plays a critical role in understanding what it means to be human. Conversely, those who believe in science use it to define what a human being is, and often disregard the moral stature espoused by Christianity. However, answering the question of what a human being is through science deviates dramatically from a scientific definition to a philosophical one.
The issue of the moral status of a fetus draws sharp arguments about whether a fetus is a human being with full rights and dignity or not. Some people perceive that a fetus is a human being that deserves full human rights and dignity. Others hold that a fetus is only a womb that belongs to the mother hence does not have a moral status which is independent of its mother (Simkulet, 2019). The controversy surrounding a fetus’s moral status is the fact that its position/standing may occasionally come into conflict with the mother’s right to choose what to do with her body. The difficult question in these circumstances is who should take precedence over the other. To answer this question, there are three theoretical understandings that aid in examining a fetus’ status relative to life and the mother:
When a fetus has full rights, it is treated as a separate being from the mother. In this case, a mother is essentially considered as being two people. The independence of the fetus from the mother is a potential cause of conflicts between a mother’s and a fetus’s rights. Since the fetus is an autonomous entity, it is conferred full rights including the right to live. In this case, a mother has no right to choose whether to keep or terminate the fetus (Andal, 2020). She has only one choice of observing the fetus’s right to life. Most societies do not forbid their pregnant women from personal lifestyles such as smoking or drinking alcohol. However, from the fetus’s point of view, smoking or drinking alcohol has adverse effects on an unborn child, hence an infringement on the fetus’s right to life.
In this approach, a fetus has no rights of its own because it is not a separate entity from the mother. This theoretical understanding asserts that any rights that a fetus might have are already conferred to the mother. The fetus can only assume full rights and dignity upon birth. Consequently, this understanding implies that pregnant mothers have full rights to decide what to do with their pregnancies. They have the option of aborting or keeping the fetus (Lörch-Merkle, 2019). Drawing from this argument, pregnant women have the right to terminate a pregnancy at any stage before giving birth. However, the mother does not have the right to kill the baby once he/she is born because, at this point, the baby has full rights like everyone else.
The argument in this theory is that a fetus acquires more rights as they advance through the gestation period. What this means is that a mother has a choice to terminate a fetus during the early stages of the pregnancy but is forbidden from doing so during the late stages of pregnancy when the embryo has taken recognizable human shape and features. At this point, Räsänen, (2017) notes, the fetus is considere
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