But what if he could be detached from the woman’s body without killing him? Now, admittedly, he will almost certainly die anyway, because in this magical hypothetical we have to add the fact he can’t live apart from this close contact with her.
But you don’t see a difference between actually reaching out and killing him, and simply detaching him without directly injuring him?
Perhaps less magical: imagine a set of conjoined twins, Albert and Ben. Albert and Ben are joined in such a away that detaching them will cause Ben to die; he won’t have enough internal organs/etc to live. Albert can live on his own if Ben is detached, but if left joined, they will both die.
Do you not see a difference between killing Ben and detaching Ben? Yes, either way, Ben will die. But, at least to me, there is a clear difference.
WTF is ‘biological truth’? You clearly can’t tell the difference between scientific findings and your religious ‘truths’.
I hate it when fundamentalists try to bring in science to support their philosophies because the more they do it, the more they have to warp science to justify their ideals. Next minute you know, they spread misinformation and/or start demonizing scientists and we get stuck with people thinking a fetus has a fully functional brain at 7 weeks or Jesus riding a dinosaur or climate science is a big librul conspiracy.
Can you please, please, please just use science only when you can make rational arguments based on nature not metaphysics? Otherwise, can you keep it out? Or here’s a compromise, can you at least not talk about ‘biological truths’ and allow for a little uncertainty in your statements. Pretty please? I’m crying over here!
But what if killing Ben makes it 100% certain that Albert will live, while detaching him gives Albert only a 90% chance of living, and he’ll walk with a limp his whole life. I don’t honestly see a difference between putting a bullet through Ben’s brain and cutting him off from the blood that keeps him alive (in either case you’re taking an action whose direct consequence is the death of Ben), and there’s a big difference to Albert which approach you take.
What about the very rare but occurring condition of an absorbed twin. Sometimes with twins one is completely absorbed into the body of the other becoming one. Often this “twin” continues to grow in some fashion into a limb or eye or some other body part. This “twin” can cause problems in the fully grown person like an eye plus it’s nerves pressing on a critical artery that my cause an embolism. So if a person was seeking treatment for such a condition would the removal of “The Eye Cluster” that was once the other twin and according to Catholic Doctrine a person be considered an abortion? Would treatment be allowed or must the fully grown person take his chances even though it was determined death might be a result without it’s removal?
So if I understand the doctrine this eye cluster twin thing would have the same moral standing as the fully grown person. Correct? Hence no treatment.
Because that’s where all of the functions that delineate our humanity come from. Or do you think with your pancreas? (I suspect *you *might.) People can lose control over every single part of their bodies but one and still be alive–consider someone like blinkie. But if the rest of the body is functioning perfectly and the brain is destroyed, it’s no longer a person, and with consent from the next of kin, we harvest the organs that remain.
That doesn’t make any sense. A sperm only has half the genetic material of a human being.
Your analogy blows. If you just kill Ben without detatching him, Albert will die as Ben’s half of the body rots. So let’s make this magical and a better analogy: If you kill Ben, his part of the body will wither up and fall off, like an umbilical cord, with no damage to Albert. But if you cut them apart, Albert will be undergoing a dangerous surgery that will leave him scarred and crippled, and may even kill him.
Well, I was going to accede to your request, but I see you’re still chirping away in this debate, so I have no idea why you think you should be able to throw posts up here and demand that they go unanswered.
My entire point in the discussion of ‘personhood’ is to highlight the fact that, unlike medical terms, there is no universally-accepted definition of a human being that excludes an embryo, as much as you obviously wish there were.
I am well aware that the vast majority of missing or extra chromosone cases end up with a dead embryo. But what of it? There are plenty of diseases that can lead to fetal death, to infant death, to toddler death, and to teen death. How is that remotely relevant to the question of whether the sufferer of a particular disease or condition is, or is not, a person?
Look, I am not saying that the personhood of an embryo is a fact that you must accept as true. Obviously I believe it; equally obviously, people of reasonable outlook may reach different conclusions and disagree. I assert it as an absolute only to respond to those who assert the contrary as an absolute: as my high school debate teacher was find of reminding us over and over, “A gratuitous assertion may be equally gratuitously denied.” In short: whether an embryo is a person cannot be flatly denied any more than it may be flatly asserted.
Your gratuitous assertion was indeed gratuitously denied. Yet you continue to argue as if it weren’t gratuitous at all, in fact it’s the very basis for your argument. The personhood of an embryo is the entire grounds of the religious dogma regarding abortion that you have been so ardently defending here.
If you now accept that your argument is gratuitous, then you can back off just a bit, can’t you?
By ‘destroyed,’ I assume you mean it won’t simply heal with time, right? That is, we’ll give a coma victim time to heal up and not simply start on his liver the morning after the accident - right? We wouldn’t say, for instance, “Let’s get the liver and corneas now, while he’s not a person! If we wait a month or two, his brain could heal and then he’d be off limits!”
But an embryo that will, in a month or two, most assuredly have brain activity, is fair game?
Thanks. Mark of a debater interested in a fair exchange, right there. I am truly appreciative of these kinds of gestures.
That’s a better analogy, I agree.
And I still say there’s a wrongness in killing Ben.
The person with a *damaged *brain has something to regain. There is memory stored there that just can’t currently be accessed. The fetus has never had a brain, so it has nothing to lose except potential. Potential personhood is not personhood.
That I stoppped beleiving in God or that an action taken by the Church would make me stop beleiving. I cannot conceive of beleiving in God and not being a Catholic. [Thisa is the end of my answer. I wikll not elaborate more, at least in this thread.]
I do not accept that a single cell of a multi-celled organism contains the life of that individual. If I cut a corner of a $20 bill it is still paper, but it isn’t worth anything.
A fertile egg can be killed very simply. Apples are not living creatures.
If you think that qustion is clever is only because it displays your ignorance or very simple biological facts.
You don’t know what biological truth is? Take up a Biology book and read it; it’ll be chokeful of it.
I specifically try to use only biology and you complain? Why? Because you can simply answer “I don’t care about no pope”? Could you point to something I said that is scientifically wrong?
By 6 weeks there’s a beating heart. Or is that also my fundamentalist-popish-misogynist warping of science?
I’ll counter science with science and metaphysics with metaphysics. Of course, you DO understand that human knowledge is not neatkly compartamentalized and ther is always overlap, e.g. if we talk about human rights (metaphysical) we need to define human (biology).
Don’t cry, just come up with good answer and stop complainig that I make sense.
