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Our Mishnah rules that an offspring acquires the sanctity of the firstborn only when the majority of its body, or the majority of its limbs, has emerged from the womb. If most of the body has not yet emerged, then the parts that have emerged do not possess the sanctity of the firstborn. Consequently, they do not require burial and may even be fed to dogs.
On our daf the Gemara presents a series of questions investigating the precise nature of the process by which the offspring becomes sanctified as a firstborn upon leaving the womb. It describes a number of unusual and even bizarre birth scenarios in order to determine whether firstborn sanctity is conferred in those cases. One of the Gemara’s questions clearly identifies the underlying issue:
“Rav Aḥa asked: What if the walls of the womb were opened? Is it the airspace of the womb that sanctifies—and that is present—or perhaps it is contact with the womb that sanctifies—and that is absent?”
In essence, the Gemara asks whether the fetus must come into direct physical contact with the cervix (or birth canal), or whether merely emerging from the womb—even without such contact—is sufficient to confer the sanctity of the firstborn.
Our daf offers two rival constructions of the uterine wall, and it is worth drawing them out with some precision, because the whole of what follows depends upon the distinction. On the first construction, the wall of the womb is a threshold and nothing more.
Its legal significance is exhausted by the act of passage: the fetus that traverses it has been born, and birth is what sanctifies. The wall, on this reading, is a boundary in the topological sense, a surface whose crossing is a legal event but whose substance carries no charge. We claim that sanctity is a function of location, not of touch; the operative category is peter rechem, the opening of the womb, understood as the fetus's own act of egress.