A two-year old child can't live without someone acting in the role of "mom," so by this definition, such a child would have no more rights than a 14-day old fetus.

Not a flame -- just pointing out one of the several flaws in this argument.

I heard on a broadcast,....that moments after conception a fetus establishes it's own blood type completely distinct from the mother's.

Maybe somebody can provide that info....

Neither can an infant. Many of the severely ill or disabled also can't live without considerable assistance. How "unsingular" of them.

...The question of whether abortion is the termination of a human life is a relatively simple one. It has been described as a question requiring no more than a knowledge of high school biology. There may be doubt that high school biology courses are clear on the subject these days, but consider what we know. The male sperm and female egg each contains twenty-three chromosomes. Upon fertilization, a single cell results containing fourty-six chromosomes, which is what all humans have, including, of course, the mother and the father. But the new organism's fourty-six chromosomes are in a different combination from those of either parent; the new organism is unique. It is not an organ of the mother's body but a different individual. This cell produces specifically human proteins and enzymes from the beginning. Its chromosomes will heavily influence its destiny until the day of its death, whether that death is at the age of ninety or one month after conception.

The cell will mutiply and develop, in accordance with its individual chromosomes, and, when it enters the world, will be recognizably a human baby. From single-cell fertilized egg to baby to teenager to adult to old age to death is a single process of one individual, not a series of different individuals replacing each other. It is impossible to draw a line anywhere after the moment of fertilization and say that before this point the creature is not human but after this point it is. It has all the attributes of a human from the beginning, as those attributes were in the fourty-six chromosomes with which it began. Francis Crick, the Nobel laureate and biophysicist, is quoted as having estimated that, "the amount of information contained in the chromosomes of a single fertilized human egg is equivalent to about a thousand printed volumes of books, each as large as a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica." Such a creature is not a blob of tissue or, as the Roe opinion so infelicitously put it, a "potential life." As someone has said, it is a life with potential.

It is impossible to say that the killing of the organism at any moment after it originated is not the killing of a human being. Yet there are those who say just that by redefining what a human being is. Redefining what it means to be a human being will prove dangerous in contexts other than abortion. One of the more primitive arguments put forward is that in the embryonic stage, which lasts about two months after conception, the creature does not look human. One man said to me: "Have you ever seen an embryo? It looks like a guppy." A writer whose work I greatly respect refers to the "the patently inhuman fetus of four weeks." A cartoonist made fun of a well-known anti-abortion doctor by showing him pointing to the microscopic dot that is the zygote and saying, "We'll call him Timmy." It is difficult to know what the appearance of Timmy (or Theresa) has to do with the humanity of the fetus. I suspect that appearance is made an issue because the more recognizably a baby fetus becomes, the more our emotions reject the idea of destroying it. But those are uninstructed emotions, not emotions based on a recognition of what the fetus is from the beginning.

Other common arguments are that the embryo or fetus is not fully sentient, or that it cannot live outside the mother's womb, or that the fetus is not fully a person unless it is valued by its mother. These seem utterly insubstantial arguments. A newborn is not fully sentient, nor is a person in an advanced stage of Alzheimer's disease. There are people who would allow the killing of the newborn and the senile, but I doubt that is a view with general acceptance. At least not yet. We will see that our culture may be on the road to accepting such killings. Equally irrelevant to the discussion is the fact that the fetus cannot survive outside the womb. Neither can a baby survive without the nurture of others, usually the parents. Why dependency, which lasts for years after birth, should justify terminating life is unexplainable. No more apparent is the logic of the statement that a fetus is a person only if the mother values its life. That is tautology: an abortion is justified if the mother wants an abortion.

My wife dealt with a hypothetical in a way that to me seems decisively to rebut all of these abortion justifications. In discussing abortion, James Q. Wilson wrote: "The moral debate over abortion centers on the point in the development of the fertilized ovum when it has acquired those characteristics that entitle it to moral respect." He did not, apparently, think the cell resulting from conception was so entitled. Wilson used an example of when moral respect persists in difficult circumstances: "An elderly man who has been a devoted husband and father but who now lies comatose in a vegetative state barely seems to be alive,...yet we experience great moral anguish in deciding whether to to withdraw his life support." My wife was moved to observe: "But suppose the doctor told us that in eight months the man would recover, be fully human, and and live normal life as a unique individual. Is it even conceivable that we would remove his life-support system on the ground that his existence, like that of the fetus, is highly inconvenient to us and that he does not look human at the moment? There would be no moral anguish but instead a certainty that such an act would be a grave moral wrong."

It is certainly more likely that a woman or a man would refuse to countenance an abortion if a sonogram showed a recognizable human being than if only a tiny, guppylike being appeared. But that is an instinctive reaction and instinctive reactions are not always the best guide to moral choice. Intellect must play a role as well. What if biology convinces us that the guppylike creature or the microscopic fertilized egg has exactly the same future, the same capacity to live a full human life, as does the fetus at three months or at seven months or the infant at birth? "It is difficult to see that the decision in the imagined case of a comatose elderly man who in time will recover is different than from the abortion decision." The elderly man in this condition may not look human (if necessary, we could add other details to his appearance to make that even clearer). He is not sentient, and could not live without artificial life support. If we alter the hypothetical so that he has not been a devoted husband and father but rather a philanderer who refused to support his children, I don't think our answer changes. Killing him would still be a moral wrong. The embryo or fetus, like the comatose man in this hypothetical, will soon be recognizable to the eye as a human being, will be fully sentient, and will be able to live outside the womb. In both cases, it is only a matter of time. The difference is that the death of the elderly man would deprive him of a few years of life, while the aborted embryo or fetus loses an entire lifetime.

The issue is not, I think, one of appearance, sentience, or anything other than the prospective life that is denied the individual by abortion. There used to be a question put: If you could obtain a hundred million dollars by by pressing a button that would kill an elderly Chinese mandarin whom you had never seen, and if nobody would would know what you had done, would you press the button? That seems to me the same issue as the abortion decision, except that the unborn child has a great deal longer to live, if you don't press that particular button. Most of us, I suspect, would like to think we would not kill the mandarin. The characteristics of appearance, sentience, ability to live without assistance, and being valued by others cannot be the characteristics that entitle you to sufficient moral respect to be allowed to go on living. What characteristic does, then? It must lie in the fact that you are alive with the prospect of years of life ahead. That characteristic the unborn child has...

Maybe a second question is when does Life End:

Answer: It always ends when the Abortionist (butcher) shows up!

P.S. Why isn't it a crime to be the one who "ends" life!

Life begins at conception because it's about comitment.

Yes, the biology is interesting, but 2 loveing people activly deciding to commit their lives to bringing a new life into the world, and commiting their energies to raise that child to adulthood is what this is all about.

Now I know there is no shortage of liberals that will do anything they can to remove their own personal responsibility from the debate, but conception is about bringing 2 commited lives together to produce another living person, and nothing more.

I believe in choice, until a person activly decides to reproduce. Once that decision is entered into, there's no going back.

Now I know there are those who want to hump anybody that will have them, without ever reproducing, and to them I say you still have a chance to take responsibility for your own actions and decisions in life when you get your tubes tied or a vasectomy.

But life begins at conception because it takes loving commited parents to grow a life into an adult.

The ova is "alive" (i.e. has life) before it meets the sperm. It must have organic life because it is produced within a living organism.

The sperm is "alive" (i.e. had life) before it meets the ova. It must have organic life for the same reason as the ova has it.

Therefore, it seems to me, the product of the meeting of the sperm and ova MUST be "alive" (i.e. has life).

This obfuscation about "14 days after conception" seems to me to be completely extranious to the discussion.

One more point: if the product of the meeting of the sperm and ova contiunes to multiply and divide cells, even before the "14 days", then it must be "alive", i.e. have life.

Is there a hole in my argument? If so, please tell me.

I'm not a doctor, biologist, etc, so maybe I'm wrong, but prove it.

http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3b9ba010258e.htm

To me that implies life as a specific and singular being.  
Maybe you can expect my conclusion: a fetus is living, but 
not yet a singular being, it cannot live without mom. - 
KirklandJunction

Thanks for the response. This thread seems to be taking off rather quickly.

As I understand it, it is at conception that a new human life is formed that is genetically distinct. The fact that each of us started our lives in our mother's uterus, should not diminish the value or importance of our life during the time of pregnancy. During the time of pregnancy, the 'young one' cannot live without mom. Neither can he/ or she talk, or ride a bike, or do differential equations, etc. But this young one is still a distinct human life that deserves the right to life that the rest of us have.

During the time of pregnancy, this young one may die of natural causes, - however they should not be deliberately killed with the misuse of 'medical' techniques.

Reminder: "Fetus" is a Latin word that means "small child", or "young one".

Any doctor will tell you that in pregnancy, parental grief is the normal and expected reaction to miscarriage and that the absence of such grief is abnormal. A parent reacting with casual indifference to such an event would be considered by most of us to be depraved.