When 'Science' and 'Magick' agree.

There has been an odd coming-together of the followers of 'Science' and the 'Occult Arts'.

In the late 1960s, I ran with a pretty artsy/hippie crowd. Among my circle of acquaintances (and one friend) were some very serious professional/semi-professional astrologers (not astronomers, although I knew a few of them as well... later). I found what they did and believed entertaining and fascinating in an arcane sort of way, and I was flattered by the chart one of them drew for me based upon my moment of birth, but I never applied this gnostic knowledge more than using "Hey, what's your sign?" when meeting girls. The whole idea of a person's identity being set when they breached the womb just made no sense to me. 

But at least three times over the last few days, I have heard and read different, well educated people (two of whom I used to respect), people who often rely of 'science' as their appeal for support, state that a 'fetus' isn't a person until it is born. Before that, it isn't a human being at all.

These followers of 'science' voiced the exact same belief as did the followers of astrology I knew forty years ago: a fetus is 'formed' into a human being at the moment it breaches the womb (as if inclusion in "humanity" is accomplished by the inflating of the lungs). Before then, it is just a "product of reproduction."