[Avodah] Ben Shiv'ah vs. Ben Shemonah

[Yehoshua Kahan]

In our Beit Midrash we've been learning Hilchot Refuah b'Shabbat during
Elul, and while learning the matter of being Mechallel Shabbat for a
newborn, I had an idea about how to explain the fact that even though a
seven-month premie is less developed and less viable than an eight-month
premie, Chazal observed/passed down/ruled otherwise.

Here's my idea:  Not a few women (I'd be helped here by statistics or even
clinical impressions) experience bleeding, though pregnant, after a month of
pregnancy.  May of those women do not lose their developing fetuses and go
one to have healthy, full-term babies.  In the time of Chazal, I'm assuming
people (including Chazal) only knew a woman was pregnant when she began not
having period for a couple/several months in a row.  A woman who was
pregnant and bled a month into the pregnancy would not be determined to be
pregnant.  It would be assumed that she had missed a period, perhaps.  She
would resume relations after the bleeding - deemed to be nidah halachically,
of course - and subsequently, she would have no more bleeding/periods
through the duration of the pregnancy.  SHE and everyone else thinks, when
the full-term, shaggy, clawed baby emerges, that she has given birth to a
seven-month fetus.  In fact, the baby is a nine-monther.  But:  when a baby
would come out in the eighth month, it would be a true premie, often lacking
hair and finngernails, and non viable in the days preceding modern medicine.

That's the gist of it.  Obviously, lots of details to fill in.  Please note
that I am making no assumptions on the Torah/Science question except that
Chazal are incredible astute and acute observers and reporters of the human
condition who understand that legal rulings are based on reality as
experienced (that last word has in itself a number of possible
understandings, but no matter...), and that therefore the viability of "ben
shiv'ah" was for them a fact to be poskened, not a folktale or an article of
faith to be inculcated.

G'mar Chatimah Tovah,

Yehoshua Kahan
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