"Can you tell me what that means for a hypothetical connection between that rubella embryo and me, because I think that ought to be the same, right?"

Well, you could say that thanks to the abortion you were born without a malformation.
Besides, the court never claimed that every child had to feel that way, just that this or those were entitled to say "I would have been born different".

I don't know whether there was an appeal, or even the result of the case. The crucial thing (and one that is a necessary conclusion of accepting abortion after medical tests) was that it was heard.

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. Gandhi

The judge's ruling reveals a somewhat mystical but not incoherent narrative interpretation of human nature, which as Cyrille is arguing is in fact consistent with a lot of ordinary expressions used by ordinary people (such as your Mother saying "if you had been a boy you would have been Wilhelm").

That doesn't mean any of it is "scientific" but that is rather beside the point. We're talking law here. Which is about the social construction of social reality.

I distribute. You re-distribute. He gives your hard-earned money to lazy scroungers. -- JakeS

If it's a "different me", it's not me at all.

Mmmm, I'm not so certain. If you were to install a synthetic memory bank in the back of your head, you would be a "different you," but there would be sufficient continuity of identity, of what cyberpunk author Shirō Masamune called "ghost," that most people would still argue - rightly, in my view - that you would still be "you."

Given appropriate technology, you could progressively replace every part of your brain with enhanced, synthetic substitutes, and still retain sufficient continuity to qualify as "you," even though there would be nothing left of the original wetware. On the other hand, simply copying your brain architecture into an advanced neural net computer and then shooting you would kill "you," at least in most people's view.

What this suggests is that the relevant distinction is in terms of the degree of continuity, or the rate of change and the fraction of the body replaced in each step.

Under that convention, the children's argument in this case is wrong, because you have a 100 % discontinuity when you flush the embryo and plug in a new one. But it is not a completely silly argument that you could in principle replace the zygote with a different one, if only you could do it one cell at a time.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.