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. This is one of the reasons why sonograms have significantly changed attitudes to abortion: they have not changed the nature of the child in the woman, but they have changed the aesthetic experience of such children by adults. Passing through the birth canal really does not change anything except the immediacy of others’ experience of the child.
