Yet, as he proceeds to comment, birth is still somewhat arbitrary. The fact that children can be born prematurely and survive birth indicates that at some point in the womb they have the same features and the same capacity for awareness and for experiencing pain.15 We might recast this as saying that the aesthetic arguments on which the “birth as dividing line” view rests are based simply on our inability to see the child in the womb, and thus, they are demonstrably arbitrary.
