Various cultures and various religions have attempted to answer the question as to when life begins at different times in history. Discovering those answers, however, is often difficult. Societies frequently have laws and customs that provide clues as to the way they think about the origin of life. But those laws and customs tend to deal with related issues, such as abortion and infanticide, rather than the beginning of life itself. Thus, scholars may be forced to make inferences about beginning-of-life beliefs from limited anthropological and ethnographic data.
Many cultures do have specific standards for determining the moment at which one becomes human. In northern Ghana, for example, a child is said to become a human being seven days after birth. In some parts of rural Japan, УhumannessФ is said to occur when a child utters its first cry after birth. Among some Native American tribes, the tradition was that the moment of becoming human did not occur until a child began to suckle at its motherТs breast. And, in a somewhat extreme case, the Ayatals of Taiwan do not grant personhood to a person until he or she is given a name at the age of about two or three years.
As might be expected, the ancient Greeks were very much interested in the question as to when life begins, partly as a matter of philosophical speculation and partly because of legal issues, such as the legitimacy of abortion. The natural philosopher Plato, for example, argued that the human soul does not enter a personТs body until birth. In such a case, abortion could not be considered as murder since the unborn organism was not yet truly a human. In contrast, PlatoТs student Aristotle believed that the beginning of life is an ongoing process that occurs up to the moment of birth. The embryo and fetus pass through various evolutionary stages until the organism is ensouled and becomes a human. Aristotle, with his usual misogynistic bent, dated this moment at about 40 days after conception for males and 90 days for females.
