Is a fetus worth more, morally speaking, than a tumor?

Great Debates
21

A tumor by definition and a fetus by proper definition are two separate forms of life. Simply put, A tumor cell my start out as, say, a kidney cell. The goal of that cell which has DIFFERENTIATED into a kidney cell is, to be a kidney cell. THAT’S IT! It will grow and grow until it becomes the best possible KIDNEY it can be. Then once that happens signal off.

A fetus in is a conglomeraltion on many types cellls that are DIFFERENTIATED. That is, each cell designed for its own purpose. Each cell gets signalled to grow and when it has become the best possible baby big toe bone it can be it STOPS. When the liver cell has evolved to be the best lever cell it can be it stops growning. (Growing not to be confused w/ regenerating) The idea is that all these WELL DIFFERENTIATED CELLS have figured out how to work togeher to create something for their sort of ‘collective common good’ which would be …drum roll… the human.
With cancer, (say Kidney) these cells (unlike their previously skilled cousins in the embryo organ example) signalling can get mixed up. The cells don’t know where to go when to grow, and , most importantly, when to stop. They scavenge food from weird sources, see no relationship between themselves biologically and the rest of the host body. The sole purpose is to go back to that oriiginal and primitive instinct: I’m going to grow to be the best kidney cell I can" And the body has no real way of turniing it off. Starts w/ 'simple ’ cancer, then spreads.

My point is, you can’t simply look at cell growth of all kinds and say that just because of similar processes, they are the same thing BY DEFINITION. You totally discounthuman intelligence and reasoning that makes us superior beings to any tumor like object.
A rather pointless question if you ask me, but sadly, I can see that many may actually buy that pseudo logic.

22

OK - I’ve totally forgotten the name of it - but what about those (tumour) things that are made from stem cells? eg the rare instances of an egg “self-fertilising” in human parthenogenesis when nearly always it grows into a big mass of teeth and hair, or something equally unpleasant.

Medical students at Uni said that theoretically, the self-fertilised egg could develop into a normal foetus, but realistically-speaking (factoring in the almost infinitely huge probability of it not doing so without the sperm’s chromosomes to “check” its development IIRC) it would be far less of a miracle for Saint Michael and all Angels to fly down to earth and impregnate a load of nuns with magic chocolate than it would for the lonely egg to become a child.

But that said, it’s still the same stuff. It’s still a poor little living hair follicle, and a poor little living tooth, that just needs a mouth (and jaw, and head, and body…) to make it useful…

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istara: those tumor things are known as teratomas… gives me the willies just thinking about them.

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First, I don’t suck my thumb. Am I not human? Of course, I could be a very advanced Turing-tested AI communicating over the Internet, but Occam’s razor and whatnot. And parasitism, if I remember my bio right, is a class of symbiosis, which involves two organisms living in proximity. Barnacles on whales, tick-birds on rhinos, etc.

Sigh. If brain activity is the defining factor in humanity, then we’re clear until the third trimester. I, for one, would be jumping with joy if the pro-life crowd acknowledged this as the thing-person barrier. At any rate, brain tumors show brain activity. And your time on the SDMB has sofened you if you believe that all humans do, too.
Remember: if X is human because of Y, then all other humans must Y, and no non-humans, including tumors, can Y.

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liguori, tell me something (I honestly don’t know). actually, tell me two things.

  1. If in cloning one uses a cancerous cell, what would one get?

  2. What is “Y” in your above point?
    And for a third: “An aqueous solution of hydrogen hydroxide”? I do not think that means what you think it means… :smiley:

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Correct me if I’m wrong, please (I slept through a large portion of Biochem), but cancer cells do NOT have DNA distinct from their hosts. Genetic replication is out of control, but it’s the same DNA being replicated that is present in (almost, disregarding things like red blood cells) every other somatic cell in the body.

So I’m afraid that YOUR argument doesn’t hold, ahem, dihydrogen monoxide.

Quix

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:eek:

Click on the smilie . . . if you dare!

(Neat. I had no idea you could turn a smilie into a hyperlink.)

28

Under the law, a fetus is worth less than a tumor, at least in one respect.

It’s easier for a minor girl to have a fetus removed without parental consent than a tumor.:wink:

29

Blalron

I wasn’t comparing it to a tapeworm. I was looking at its function and means of living and noticed that it was very much like a parasite.

To say all humans are animals is not to compare a human to a cat. Please.

http://www.inhs.uiuc.edu/cee/biocontrol/parasites/definitions.html

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This is an ignorant debate!
robertlig:
I have not seen any studies on brain tumor EEG’s! Brain tumors interfere w/ electrical activity, they don’t generate it themselves.

Brain activity is not THE defining factor in humanity. That is not what I said. Your op asked the question are fetuses more worthy to ‘survive’ than tumors? Yet you go on to mentally masturbate about scientific concepts about which you have no real knowledge .
If you choose not to value the life/potential life of a fetus that is your business. A fetus is, in a very strict sense a MASS OF GROWING CELLS. That is correct.

But its function and design is much different than that of a tumor; thus by definition, they are two totally separate things. If you want to say a tumor and a fetus are equally valuable in a moral sense, then don’t misuse/misinterpret the ONE similarity that they share on a SCIENTIFIC level to SCIENTIFICALLY validate your MORAL ideology.

I have to go now, my brain tumor is giving me a headache and I feel a seizure coming on. If I could only find my ear pacifier.

31

This is a stupid debate. We cannot define personhood biologically. If we claim that fetuses are equivalent to tumors or tapeworms, and therefore are underserving of protection as persons, then why do we protect retarded people, or people in comas, or old people, or sleeping people, or ANY people? After all, people are just masses of cells. You could take a couple cells from this person and not harm them. You could take hundreds of cells from a person and not harm them. How many cells do you have to remove from a person to harm them? Meaningless question. I could slice off your arm, and I have only harmed a very few cells. The cells in your arm will be fine, the rest of the cells in your body will be fine. So what’s the harm?

Trying to look at this from a “scientific” point of view is fruitless. Science can inform our choices, but it doesn’t make our choices. We choose to give legal protection to people. We grant personhood to entities.

Why can’t I kill people? What scientific reason can you give me that would make it wrong for me to kill people? I can define you as a clump of cells and wipe you off the face of the earth. Cosmologically it doesn’t matter. Nobody cares. So why can’t I?

Because we agree that if I don’t kill you you won’t kill me. And why do we do that? Because if we make that agreement we can get things done. Why do we care that we live? Because we evolved to care, since organisms that had a tendency didn’t reproduce.

An embryo is a clump of cells. A fetus is a clump of cells. A baby is a clump of cells. An adult is a clump of cells. Some clumps of cells can create new clumps of cells or transform themselves into different clumps of cells. So what? That’s not the important thing. The important thing, is what kind of life do we wish to have, in this meaningless universe? Do we want to live in the kind of society where clumps of cells are the property of other clumps of cells? Consistency is for losers. But what kind of world do we want to create?

The universe doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter whether this clump of cells grows and diversifies, and that other one sickens and dies. Makes no difference. Except it makes a difference to me. Yes, it makes no difference that it makes a difference to me. So what? It still makes a difference. I want to live, I want to have children. Meaningless. So what?

Stop arguing definitions, and start arguing about what kind of public policy we want in order to have the kind of society we want, in order to lead the kind of lives that we want. You want abortions to be legal? Explain why. You want to stop abortion? Explain why. But stop arguing about the characteristics of the fetus that somehow make it different or the same than a baby or an adult or a tumor or a cell or an amoeba. There is no difference!

If fetuses get killed, that could have grown up to be Mozart, it doesn’t matter. We can kill them if we want to. Nobody cares except us. If that’s the kind of world we want, nobody can stop us. I, personally, care. That doesn’t mean that I’m right. It just means that I care. That’s not the kind of world I want to live in. I’d rather have something different happen. I’d rather not have those meaningless clumps of cells destroyed before they can grow and become a person.

Nothing magical happens to those cells during the time between when they are separate gametes and when it is a zygote, and when it is a blastula, and when it is an embryo, and when it is a fetus and when it is a baby and when it is a child, and when it is an adult and when they are separate gametes again. No magic. We can decide to kill the cells at any point in this process. So what? Make up your mind, decide what kind of world you want to create.

32

No one compared them to tapeworms but my detractors.

33

You’re confusing “intellectually honest” with “agreeing with me”.

34

And of course, it’s not. See A Fetus Is Not A Parasite.

35

“Sigh”? You make it sound like this is something everyone should know… when in reality, it’s not even factual.

Brain wave activity can be detected at just six weeks after conception – which is when the earliest surgical abortions take place. This also means that brain activity takes place long before the third trimester, contrary to your claim.

36

Oh, man. I got into a thoughtful discussion with JThunder over who needs to present the argument, burden-of-proof wise. And you are no JThunder, Lemur866.

You cannot slice off my arm cells because they are my damn arm cells. I can slice them off for the same reason. An 80-year old with a painful disorder can do the same to his brain cells, and a woman with unwanted cells in her reproductive system has every moral right to remove them. This is the problem, Lemur866. My ethics on what constitutes a person do not match yours (presumabley. You may be one heck of a devil’s advocate.). I posit leaving control of your reproductive system up to you.

And the parasite definition is devolving into semantics. I learned it different from the site. Hells, the relationship between mother and zygote/fetus/et al is certainly parasitical.

Note to pro-choicers: The last abortion debate I was embroiled in ended with me against five or six pro-lifers, including JThunder. Please, if you have something to say, say it.
And pro-choicers, too. The more the merrier.

37

"Certainly" as in “I don’t need to provide a biological cite that specifically includes z/e/f in the parasitical definition”?

Been down this road before.

**

This would be the same abortion debate where you asserted that you had no problem with infanticide…but that infants aren’t children… (among other interesting assertions) …correct?

Do you really wonder why pro choice folks were not chomping at that particular bit?

38

Fact: z-e-fs draw nutrients from their host, at the expense of the host.
Fact: parasites draw nutrients from their host, at the expense of the host.
Fact: The bio textbook I used had no agenda, and felt no need to add a qualifier of species to its definition.

And my personal opinions on when children should become people (that is, sentient), and when they should become legally protected as people bear no relavence to my argument. Or my OP. By the way. I’m overweight. Feel free to work that into your next ad hominem “argument”.

39

Arg…

Ok folks… Look at life, as a whole. What’s it goal? To extend it’s existance as long as possible.

Now, what’s special about higher organism’s cells?

They are all programed to die. Each and every one of our cells are DESIGNED to die, we have flaws in our DNA, the proteins which make new DNA and we have molecular pathways designed to cause the cell to die either at a certain point in time, or if it recieves enough damage.

Now, this goes against generally held beliefs about life. Cells want to live for as long as possible. And if our cells lived forever, we wouldn’t die. All is happy in the organism with the immortal cells, he has a higher fitness than all of the other members of his species.

So what is cancer? Cancer is basically a cell that has mutated so it is no longer effected by the ‘self termination signals’ and has mutated so it’s DNA can replicate endlessly (human cells are good for about 50 rounds of replication).

Basically, cancer is a GOOD thing, from the cellular viewpoint. The cell is hardier, lives longer and can reproduce faster and with a greater number of daughter cells (which is why the cancers spread and kill you). It’s a bad thing for the organism, since the organism cannot survive existing as only a single cell type.

Whereas what is a fetus? It has all of the same flaws and sort lifespan that the parents have.

So in the general scheme of evolution which is better that brain tumor or your son/daughter?

The cancer. It’s mutations allow it to be hardier, produce more ‘offspring’ and live longer.

A child takes years to be able to reproduce, reproduction cycles are slow, and few offspring are generated each time.
…

From a purely biological standpoint, until the time comes when the fetus is developed enough to survive on it’s own, it’s basically just another lump of cells in a woman’s body. Awareness, what we use to determine ‘human’ is not really measurable. We all have opinions about what it is, and what we feel it’s rights should be. But there is no way you can ask a collection of 8 rapidly dividing cells it’s opinion.

Anyone, with a vague sense of eduction should understand that while cancer cells are just as alive as a fertalized egg, the difference is that one has a chance to become a human. The question is: when does the parasitic tissue change from being a parasite to being a human conciousness. Why haven’t we defined conciousness yet?

Basically: if you don’t understand the science you are talking about, don’t use it in an arguement.

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