Posted on 12/04/2008 1:37:22 PM PST by NYer
Like Horton said, “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”
The ovum is alive, and has been the woman's entire life. The ovum actually begins its cellular division while the woman is still in the womb.
Early philosophers thought the sperm cell contained a little tiny person inside it, but then someone wondered if the sperm person was male, would it not have even smaller sperm-people inside its testicles; and wouldn't the males inside the sperm-person’s testicles also have sperm-people inside their testicles, etc, etc, reducto ad absurdum.
If you can’t mark the point at which there is a bright line between “no human life” and “human life”,
killing that life is gross criminal negligence.
There are those that claim the USSC has defined this bright line at 3 months. I’ve actually heard someone argue this - that one day prior, it is not a human life, and one day after it is. (Yet they didn’t support outlawing partial birth abortion - go figure)
I once read where someone said “Everything is present at fertilization. Nothing is added, only developed” A simple statement but it contains all the truth.
And before you know it, he’s 8” taller than you and eating everything but the cat, who has sensibly disappeared.
This would apply also BEFORE the sperm and egg physically meet. No egg should go unfertilzed. No sperm should be left wanting for his egg.
And haircuts are murder.LOLOLOLOL : )
It's been too long, Romulus.
Actually it could be a lot older than that. Would we turn a ten year old loose ? If he'd had no training, no interaction, been "nailed into a barrel and fed through the bunghole" ?
Your argument is even better than you think. And your libertarian needs to try his argument at a meeting of Libertarian Party members. He'd get creamed by at least 50%.
Of course, the other ~50%, acting on the "alien intruder" idea (demonstrably false) would disagree.
The truth: Every embryo is a potential human being. Yet at least 50% of them, probably much more, depending on the age of the woman who produced the egg, are incompatible with growth beyond the 12th week of pregnancy. Most of that 50% who would not make it, don’t even make the implantation. Some make it a couple weeks, and a very few make it to 11 or 12 weeks.
We are talking about aneuploidy here, chromosomal abnormalities that will not allow growth to fetus stage. (We are not talking about other problems that would leave to viable kids but with disorders.) Many, many embryos are aneuploid to the point of never making it, even some that are formed by a young couple in their 20s. It is 95% due to the egg and not the sperm, because sperm “naturally select.” The bad ones don’t get to the egg.
But we do not know (without special testing that has only come into being commercially in 2008) which embryos are going to be viable. That’s the key. Each embryo MIGHT grow to be an 80-year-old one day.
Saying something is essentially "religious" means that its confirmation depends on faith—which St. Paul called "evidence of things not seen." Well, with electron microscopy, you can't say the beginning of life is not seen. I've seen the pictures. What's "religious" is the denial in the face of physical evidence of the fact that life begins at conception.
What the socially liberal fellow meant to say is that the origin of life is a fact with moral implications—which many people who are religious happen to be interested in. He finds those implications inconvenient, but has no facts to protect himself with. So he makes recourse to his "faith" that the videos do not show life beginning, even though they plainly do.
It’s not news to me but informing the willingly ignorant isn’t easy.
The answer is that human life began a long time ago and the cells in question are never not alive. There is no point in the process where there is an absence of life. The real question is when does the child become a distinct individual that is no longer a part of either parent.
It certainly has been too long. Good to see you. I’m well and I hope you are.
Life begins at the moment of contraception! ;)
Michael Tooley has a fairly (in)famous essay that defends both infanticide and abortion, not only because an infant can’t take care of itself but because the reality is that infants are born with brains that are still developing and with capabilities not all that different from those found in many adult animals. So the debate boils down to two criteria which are looking at the capabilities of the child (being able to take care of itself, mental capacity) which is going to lead you to draw the line (as honest abortion supporters like Tookey and Peter Singer do) after even birth and looking at the likely future capabilities and existence whichis goint to lead you to draw the line at fertilization. Any line drawing between those points is arbitrary. The only other argument one can make is that an unborn child is, in fact, a person but that a pregnant woman should have the authority to kill that person, anyway.
Embryos that will not survive are irrelevant to the abortion debate because they will abort themselves.
The sperm and the ovum can’t become a brand new human being on their own.
However, the moment conception happens, we have a brand new human organism, completely separate from the parents on a genetic level.
Hence the focus on ‘conception’.
Sperm = Who cares?
Ovum = Who cares?
Sperm + Ovum = Developing human being = I care!
Should a doctor report an apparent miscarraige to the police to be investigated as a possible homicide?
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