Nobody in their right mind is arguing life isn’t the end result of conception, but there are perfectly valid reasons for people not considering a clump of cells with no sentience or nervous system a human being.
And this plays into the whole point of the thread! What are those reasons? Why can’t anyone explain their stance except to say that it is their stance? If it’s so glaringly obvious, why can’t anyone explain themselves beyond stating their opinion? 
I’d say lack of sentience and a nervous system is a pretty clear answer.
No. Only that the particular terms we use to discuss these things (“conception”, for example) are chosen for our convenience, not because they capture something essential.
Of course there’s a living thing there before – an egg. It’s different afterwards, but the gestation process is a whole series of milestones where one form of life is replaced by a different form of life. Picking one milestone in particular is an arbitrary choice. Why not pick the moment when the heart starts beating? Or the moment when brain function begins? Or the moment when the fetus is viable outside the womb? Or the moment when the egg is formed in the mother’s ovary?
But, of course, the fertilized egg doesn’t just magically poof into existence. It’s not “created”. It’s changed from what was there before.
Your entire question is ill-posed. You’re *assuming *that human life must begin at a specific moment in time, when actually it makes more sense to think of it as a gradual incremental process.
I really think you need to read Cecil’s argument (and follow-up) on the matter. It’s the first time I’ve seen someone actually look at abortion logically, and what convinced me to no longer be pro-life. (Although I won’t go so far as to say I’m pro-choice, as I do not think the woman always has the right to choose.)
In my opinion, it’s all in gradation. Prior to conception, it is no big deal to terminate life. After birth, it is clearly 100% wrong. Since any specific point in the middle would be arbitrary, it follows logically that it is a gradual process. Now, a child may have full rights earlier on, and there may be an extended period where the zygote/embryo/fetus does not have any rights.
But this idea that human life begins at conception means that all human rights begin at conception is silly. Unless you also care about all those roaches you kill, you’re just being speciesist.
This time I won’t ignore the movement of the goal posts - I didn’t say the fetus isn’t alive.
You are preaching to the choir here bub. I didn’t have children yet I spend thousands of dollars a year to send other folks’ kids to an extremely sub-par public school system. So don’t whine at me about having to spend extra to send kids I had no say in creating to a better school when it’s parents like you who keep jacking up our property taxes.
None of which as anything to do with the right to choose where your kid goes to school, which was your original claim.
Shrug. Again, you are asking the wrong person because I couldn’t care less about the fetus or the baby. However, I am assuming that there is someone else out there other than the now dead mother who cared about the fetus and would like to see it turn into a baby.
Miscarriage is not birth.
Is there going to be a response from you where you don’t try to move the goal posts?
Obviously, I am not in charge of the laws. However, unlike you, I believe that others can choose to define things the way they want. Since the Scott Peterson trial happened in California, which is a highly liberal nanny state, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear there is a law here that states a fetus has “person status” after such-and-such time frame. However, that doesn’t change in the slightest that my opinion is that the fetus is not a person until birth.
So far, yes. Yours? Not so much.
I fail to see where I shouted. As for your point, if you feel it wasn’t addressed, it is your responsibility to restate it in a clearer fashion, preferably including an explanation as to where I misunderstood the first time.
OK, again, I didn’t shout. For the record THIS IS SHOUTING, m’k? Simply because I state something you didn’t agree with doesn’t make it shouting.
Now, as for your “point” - the only reason you think there is a “tyranny of arbitrarily ending lives” is because you believe in life at conception or some such extremely early time. Which is all well and good for you and your situation, but you simply have no right to try to force your beliefs off onto other people. Particularly when your beliefs involve the lives, health and welfare of those other (real, breathing) people. It is even more disgusting when it is done because your religion told you to (I don’t know if that is your particular problem or not).
A zygote.
If it is an incremental process, there must be some point at which the process is completed, otherwise there is no such thing as “life.”
And the fertilized egg is created. The egg by itself cannot become a new life (whether at conception or through a rigorous 12 step program), nor can the sperm. The two together create something new. It’s like saying that a house wasn’t created because the wood and nails existed before. To answer your question, that is why life cannot be defined as beginning when the egg is formed in the mother’s ovary (this, of course, ignores that fact that females are born with ovarian follicles, which would mean that life began when the previous life did - what a fun debate that would be).
As for the other questions (i.e. life beginning when the heart starts beating), I’ve addressed this type of argument before - that would be defining life as beginning at some point after the creation of an object, but only when it has met arbitrary guidelines.
This is all getting into the weeds, as my point was in the discussion of such issues, not necessarily in the validity of each point. Notice that you take my arguments and question them, and I do the same with yours. This isn’t possible if someone has an opinion simply for the sake of having an opinion. My opinion is that there is no logical explanation beyond life beginning at conception (and I’ve tried to argue that - logically), yours is that the creation of life is a process. Nobody is calling anyone a fucktard or demanding that they proven wrong. My original post was about people who act that way.
Sorry to have three posts in a row here guys but…
Penderel, dear - you cannot explain yourself beyond stating opinions! Don’t you get that everything you believe is merely opinion?
Because inflicting pain is morally relevant. An unliving thing that could feel pain would deserve consideration that a living thing that can’t feel pain does not. A sentient robot that feels pain and an insect which doesn’t, for example.
To keep society functioning.
Because the anti-abortion scum are trying to use such cases as legal wedges to force their views into law.
It is. Women have the right to control their own body. You want to enslave them, to assert that you not they own their bodies and can use them as they see fit. You’re just an especially self righteous version of a rapist.
No, it’s about woman hating monsters who desire the torment and oppression of women. That’s what the anti-abortion movement is, a hate movement and nothing more. Forcing a woman to carry a fetus to term is the moral equivalent of chaining her to a bed and raping her for nine months; an act of utter evil.
Oh, please.You just want the pro-choice people to shut up and act meek and deferential while the woman haters call them “murderers” and issue death threats. Abortion needs little “justification”, it’s no more immoral than having a wart removed. The “name calling” against the anti-abortionists is because they genuinely are a collection of bigots, tyrants and sadists. Utter scum. And if you don’t like being called things like that, stop trying to enslave, torture and murder women. Because that is what you are doing whether you choose to admit it or not.
Of course. But it’s certain not “completed” at the moment of conception.
But surely you wouldn’t say that the house was “completed” at the moment the blueprints are finalized. Building a house is a gradual process. At each step along the way something that’s less house-like becomes something that’s more house-like. At a certain point in the process (probably after the walls go up) most people would agree that it’s a house. But there’s room for argument. Is it a “house” when its just a wooden frame? A concrete slab? A hole in the ground? A drawing on paper? An idea in an architect’s head?
We could certainly decide that a finalized blueprint is a “house”. But such a definition is neither obvious nor useful. The same is true of arbitrarily defining a fertilized egg as a “human being”. A fertilized egg certainly contains all the information it needs to BECOME a human being, but, like a blueprint, it is not one yet.
Hey!! Nice to see someone reads my posts, and I’m not on ‘universal ignore’. But I hope you realize that I’m one of the minority of ‘conservatives’ on this board, and probably agree with you 60 to 90 percent. The ‘retarded fuckwit’ comment was a joke directed at the “why is this in the pit” person I quoted, and not at you. Everything else, after that, was my actual comment on your OP.
Too late for the edit window.
I disagree with you on the abortion issue. The question is not when “life” begins, because the sperm and egg are alive before fertilization. Life goes back a few billion years, and has been continuous. The proper question is “when does it become a person, deserving of legal recognition and protection”, which is arbitrary, and a political question, not scientifically answerable. And I disagree with “conception” as an answer. But this is the type of political/religious argument I mentioned in my first post that I prefer to avoid, so I’m not weighing in on it.
This may be true, but if you’re willing to back it with violence it usually works out o.k..
Yes, but you have shown that you have given thought to your position, and therefore not a member of the group the OP asks about.
I’m not going to accept the moving of these particular goal posts. It’s completely legal to kill your dog at any time, for any reason. You can shoot it in the head. You can pay a vet to give it an injection. You can turn it into a shelter where it’s odds of being adopted are small. All legal.
It might be illegal to drown newborn litters of puppies, nowadays, but that would be a recent regulation of the method of killing allowed.
Not explaining a stance and not convincing you to change your mind are two different things. You obviously are very much disturbed by the idea that there is not a single instant at which an unarguably complete human is present. You need to have that moment. Your logic falters around that need.
When you approach that magic point, you make odd non sequitur statements about dead eggs, live miscarrages, and houses. Then you say that anyone who noticed that the emperor zygote has no clothes, or more than one cell, is being arbitrary, arbitrary, arbitrary.
The point at which the process is completed is called ‘death.’
We’re not saying that an egg begins ‘a new life’. We’re saying that it’s alive. And it is. It’s every bit as alive as the fertilized egg (zygote) that comes after it. Both are single cells. One might begin to divide, going on to become multi-cellular, but then it also might not. The other definitly won’t, but it will be alive until it dies. We don’t know how many fail to divide in situ, but we know that a fair number don’t in vitro.
I don’t know what we’d be debating. This is obviously (at least to me) a matter of life transforming as it goes forward. The Life began a long time ago. When individuals exist is a separate question.
I’m cool with that. But there is logic, and then there are the premises upon which logic operates. You get upset when someone uses a premis that you do not accept, personally.
Let’s look at the zygote through time. It divides and becomes a morula, a mass of up to 16 undifferentiated cells. A morula is very different from a zygote. Then the morula turns into a blastula, a sphere of undifferentiated cells with a hollow inside. In both the morula and the blastula, the cells are talking to each other in a dance of chemicals, and waiting for a message from outside. Most of the cells will not go on to be part of a baby.
Most of the cells will make the amniotic sac, the placenta, and the umbilical cord. All of these things are alive. All of them must be present to support and embryo, which will eventually form. When the blastula contacts the lining of the uterus (endometrium), the cells of the endometrium talk to the cells of the blastocyst.
During the conversation, the cells nearest the endometrium begin saying “I’m going to start changing.” The cells further from contact reply, “I’m going to change into something different.” The near cells begin getting ready to form the placenta and umbilical chord while the far cells begin forming the amniotic sac. The near cells get ready by turning into stem cells.
Still no baby at the end of week one. But one or more of the stem cells (or one of the stem cells daughter cells) will get lucky and get the chemical OK to begin forming an embryo. If the cell mass never contacts the endometrium, no cell will start transforming into a cell that will eventually form anything. Conception alone will not cause an undifferentiated embryonic cell to differentiate and form anything except another undifferentiated embryonic cell.
These are interesting stages. Somewhere along the continuum of morula to blastocyst, you reach a point where you can cut the mass of cells in half and the cells will keep talking and eventually form two individuals. You can cut it in quarters and four individuals will be formed.
This is not a typical reaction for a human. I have no trouble concluding that if you can cut it in half and get two, it wasn’t a human individual. It was alive. Now they’re alive. They contain human genes. They will eventually form a human. . . probably. Let’s assume that they will.
If two are born from a morula or blastocyst that split, then obviously those individuals did not exist at conception, because at conception there was only one. More interesting, you can bump two of them together, and if their chemical dances are able to interact, they’ll combine, so that two morulae (or blastocysts) become one individual, called a chimera
Again, this is not a typical reaction for a human. And again, the individual that results was not present at conception. I have no problem saying that there’s no human individual present at the end of week one. You can’t even identify which cells will and won’t go on to form the cells that will form the cells that will form. . . . You get the idea.
At the end of week two, there is enough structure presentto identify which cells will (most probably) go on to form a fetus and which will form support structures instead. The support structures are alive. If they weren’t alive, they wouldn’t be able to support the life of the fetus. They will die when the fetus is born.
I don’t know if you can cut it in half and get two individuals. But you’d need a microscope and a degree to identify which bits will produce cells that after a Russian doll series of produced cells will produce a cell that is part of a fetus and which bits won’t. I’m willing to call that not an individual human.
At the end of three weeks, the zygote is gone. The morula is gone. The blastocyst is gone. But you still only have folded layers of tissue, and you’d still need a microscope and a degree to sort out which bits will go on after birth and which will die at birth.
If I really needed an difinitive point at which there is unarguably a human individual present, I might have declared one by now. But I don’t have that need. I’m comfortable with continua and shades of grey. I can ask myself, at each stage, is it logical to call this an individual human? And I’m not seeing a human, here. There are tissues that will eventually make limbs, but there are no limbs. There are tissues that will make a heart and nerves, but there is not heart and there are no nerves.
All stages up to the end of week 8 can be called an embryo. At then end of eight weeks, I’d start to have trouble saying this isn’t an individual human. You could make the argument. Here’s where things start to get arbitrary. But they’re arbitrary because that’s the nature of these things, not because people are being arbitrary about them.
It’s like the old **B.C.**cartoon, with the caveman at the answer rock. Another caveman comes up and asks:
Q: Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?
A: What are you going to do with my answer?
Q: I’m going to make fruit salad.
A: It’s a vegetable.
At eight weeks, when you ask me if it’s human, I’ll start asking what you’re going to do with the answer, because there are multiple categories that can be used to formulate an answer. The different categories will result in different conclusions.
I’m going to stop now. I may start again, and talk about how Intent influences decisions related to fetuses. I may talk about my personal week 3 decisions. But I’d better review and post or I’ll be here all night.
Apologies to all who posted while I was wrestling with this.
Unless you’re a creationist. Then the chicken came first. It only pretends to be a joke. It’s actually a creation/evolution shibboleth.
Which has nothing to do with what I said, but OK.
(Also, technically, it is not completely legal to shoot a dog in the head everywhere. Maybe by now, no where in the US)
Thank you for posting. It was very helpful for me.
Did I sound like I was arguing with you? If it did, I’m sorry. I wasn’t. It’s completely your call how you want to argue with anyone, and I think you’re doing a good job. I just didn’t feel like leaving it looking like maybe it was illeagal to kill your dog.
And it may be illegal to shoot a dog, especially in some areas. I was basing the legality on a story that a cop told about another cop being asked to shoot an old lady’s dog.
Well, cops are a different thing. I imagine it is still legal to shoot one’s own dog in some places, but given that we cannot shoot guns in most cities, and given the lack of firearm skills most folks have these days, I wouldn’t be surprised if it would be considered illegal in most places. I really don’t know - I haven’t had to shoot a dog for well over 20 years.