Posted on 10/09/2006 7:25:37 PM PDT by Coleus
I don't see that that makes a difference. What happens here on earth is a blip in all of eternity and if this was all there was, I could see the point, but it isn't. Those souls make it to heaven and that's not a waste. God likes to do things in a big way and lots of it; sand on the seashore and stars in the sky kind of thing. So it's not too much of a stretch to me to figure: *So what if these souls/people/whatever, don't have a life here on earth*?; they have a life in heaven and will populate it and fulfill a purpose there for all time and eternity.
If this is the way God intended it, it would strike me as rather wasteful.
I don't think that's the way God intended at all. He created a perfect, uncorrupted world. If you recall, one of the results of the Fall was that Eve's conception and child birth was greatly increased. It doesn't sound like what God had planned originally was for that (miscarriages) to be happening. As a matter of fact, if they had not sinned and continued to be perfect, I wouldn't expect there to be any conception that didn't make it to full term. A perfect body would work perfectly.
I don't believe that God does anything without a reason so I don't think that He does anything that's wasteful. If all those pregnancies didn't make it here, they still have a purpose, somewhere, sometime.
Does anybody know whether there has been more recent research on this?
In any case, this does not amount to proof that early embryos are soulless matter. In some very poor areas, the rate of childhood mortality is over 50%, but that doesn't prove that children under the age of five are soulless.
If it is a property of a normal healthy human zygote to grow itself a brain in 6 weeks, then every human zygote must be assumed to have a brain-growing nature. A human nature. And any living being that has a human nature, has a human soul. All the more reason why the paresnt of an embryonic child have the moral obligation to provide, to the best of their ability, the nurture necessary to their little one in its -- frankly splendid and wondrous --- developmental project.
Public policy can't be based on any speculation that draws some arbitrary line between human life and personhood. The law has to regard them as being coterminous. Whether or not the living zygote is ensouled from the git-go, i.e. at fertilization, the law should presume that human rights begin where human life begins. And that would be, biologically speaking, at the formation of a totipotent cell, and continuously thereafter until the complete, irreversible cessation of total brain activity.
The law must refuse to separate "human life" from "personhood," because if it does, it has to create a legal class of human beings devoid of human rights.
I would never put that kind of power in the hands of the State.
Actually, people do have a right. The right to procreate is a very basic fact of life. It's how life survives. Who are you to decide who gets to procreate? Barbra Streisand?
You do have a right to have your body function naturally, without interference from others. Procreation in that form certainly is a right.
Nature decides who can't and can have children biologically. There is no absolute right to a child. As soon as your actions cause harm to another, they cease to be moral. No matter how young that other person is.
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