Interestingly enough, all the arguments are centered around “What is a human being”. A technically dead human being would fulfil all the criteria this paper presumes, except for cell division, which does not occur in living human beings.
Logically, if there can be dead human beings, being human does not equate to alive.
The arguments in the paper only argue that the foetus is a human being, not life.
I also quote a refutatation of the paper.
It appears that I have made a logical error. A bunch of arm cells and a foetus are both alive. The difference between them are (or should be) rights. I realise that the individual cells in a foetus must be alive, as they have biological function. However, I contend that they are only alive in the sense of any other cell, and not worthy of being accorded seperate rights.
Please continue.
d_redguy: -2.38, -3.23; Agree
Just for the record, I heard a heartbeat in my wife’s tummy yesterday. 155 bpm. It’s not her heartbeat. The owner of said heartbeat has only been “alive” in this context for 11 weeks. I doubt said “life” is “sentient” in a capacity that would enable it to participate in this thread. But hey, it’s my kid, and I’m pretty damn impressed by that heartbeat. 
And, in that context, **xtisme’s quote is entirely inapplicable. :smack:
I think an example that is closer to the pregnant woman & fetus case is the following: What if there are two siamese twins, and they are both fully developed and functioning, except for the fact that one of them does not have a vital organ (say a liver) and would die if the two were separated.
Does the fully-functional twin have the absolute right to decide the fate of his twin, even based on a whim? Because pro-choicers say (as far as I know) that it is the mother’s absolute choice and she can make it for whatever reason she wants.
This does not relate to what I was saying. I was refuting the “it doesn’t feel pain therefore it is not alive & we can destroy it” argument
Also, so what? Are you now proposing a new rule for when not to kill humans: “when they have a brain structure which represents a lifetime or thoughts, feelings, emotions, and interactions”
What about people with Alzheimer’s? Can we kill them then?
This is clearly wrong.
If you go to Rome and take several pictures and come back with a roll of negatives, and I take the roll of negatives and destroy it, is that the same as you not having taken the pictures in the first place? I’d say you would be pretty pissed in the former case, but not about the latter.
Also, if I destroy the negatives, wouldn’t you say that I destroyed your pictures? Or, since they were not developed, they were not really pictures yet, because they only had “potential” to become pictures, so no big deal!
What does it matter if you can’t tell the difference just looking at it? You can tell the difference in other ways. If you can’t tell the difference between real and fake diamonds or dollar bills just by looking at them, does that make them the same?
Why is an adult human sacred and an adult monkey nonsacred? Because, as human beings we value our own species more than other species. Some animal-rights people might object to this, but this is another discussion, and has nothing to do with abortion for humans.
Just for the record, I’ve had 4 children and buried one who died at age 9 months due to a heart defect. Neither me or my wife have ever considered abortion. However, its our PERSONAL choice.
-XT
And one last thing about “potential”
Many try to discredit the “fetus has the potential to be human” by saying “so does sperm, and DNA in your leg, and …”
However, there are different degrees of potential.
A blank piece of paper has a much different potential to become a literary masterpiece compared to a half-finished play by Shakespeare.
A bowl of flour and sugar has a much different potential to become a great tasting pie compared to a pie that has already been made and is almost finished baking.
I’m not saying this proves the fetus is alive or human, I’m just trying to point out that the sperm/DNA/etc comparisons are incorrect.
Wow…talk about your irony…your question was
"Give a reason, then. Why is a foetus alive, and any other bunch of cells not? "…so you’re asking about whether an organism is alive or not…as if it’s relevant to the abortion debate…when the very source you cite says that questions about when something is alive are “irrelevant to the abortion debate”.
Her response to the Irving piece is dubious at best…
I’ve read plenty of biologists and embryologists who differ on the ramifications of conception (whether a z/e/f is “fully developed” enough to warrant any “rights” with respect to the “rights” of the mother) , I’ve yet to read any mainstream biologist or embryologist who does not suggest that a unique human life is created during the process of conception. Surely (since Irving provides several cites from established geneticists and embryologists) “Eileen” could provide “one” teeny weeny cite of differing opinion?
She claims that Irving’s appeal to authority is based on “anonymous” authority. Did I miss the various cites at the bottom of my link?
Here…I’ll help you and her out
B. Lewin, Genes III (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1983), pp. 9-13; A. Emery, Elements of Medical Genetics (New York: Churchill Livingstone, 1983), pp. 19,
William J. Larsen, Human Embryology (New York: Churchill Livingstone, 1997), pp. 4, 8, 11.
Ronan O’Rahilly and Fabiola Müller, Human Embryology & Teratology (New York: Wiley-Liss, 1994). See also, Bruce M. Carlson, Human Embryology and Developmental Biology (St. Louis, MO: Mosby, 1994), and Keith L. Moore and T.V.N. Persaud, The Developing Human (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, 1998).
(and several more…they’re at the bottom of my linked page)
I REALLY get a chuckle out of her homepage…
http://eileen.undonet.com/
Of course looking at the rest of the web site…(referring to the American Life League as American Lie League etc…, for example)
Ummm. Yeah. Credible source ya got there :rolleyes:
(+0.75, -5.00)
Strongly disagree.
Not much to add.
OK. It’s your personal choice. I think what is being debated here is whether or not it should be your personal choice. It could be my personal choice to shoot people in the street. Of course, I would never consider it. But it would be my PERSONAL choice. Now’s the part where you tell me I am setting up a straw man…
In the old days, children did not have many rights and many parents beat the sh*t out of their kids.
Most probably, in those days, someone might have said: “I choose not to whip my kids until they bleed, but it is a PERSONAL choice for each parent to make”
Today, of course, if a parent whips a child or otherwise beats them to a pulp, we as a society do care and we do not think this is their PERSONAL choice, and in fact there are laws against such behavior.
A different tack, then. Should a pregnant woman be allowed to smoke? After all, smoking and drinking are scientifically proven to harm the foetus. How about suicide? Should the woman be allowed to commit suicide?
By logical extension, smoking would constitute a battery against the foetus, and suicide murder. Is this right?
Sure, I’m all for it. Especially the suicides. I say that we punish pregnant women who commit suicide to the fullest extent of the law.
Smoking and drinking? Is it illegal to provide minors with alcohol and cigarettes? Works for me.
Look it that way: As a taxpayer, you can either pay now a small amount of money for the low-income woman to have the abortion, or you can pay a bigger amount of money later for funding the police, because these kids usually end up as criminals.
So, in order to save even more money, we should have public programs that actively encourage abortion among low-income women, in order to minimize those pesky “police expenses”.
To clarify, I do grant human rights to brain damaged or comatose organisms out of enlightened self-interest: I might become one of those things, and would wish every effort to be made to return me to full sentience. I cannot become a tadpole-like organism or indeed a separate sperm and egg, both of which have similar potential for sentience (as indeed will a cloned cell given recent advances: should throwing away dead skin cells be considered murder since they are potential human beings?)
Incorrect how? Cloning might advance to the point where, once the procedure has begun, there is nigh certainty that a human being will eventually result - the question of degree would then be irrelevant. And, as I explained in my OP, a young fertile couple is arguably more certain of eventually producing a human than even, say, a fertilised egg in a 50-year-old woman’s womb. Appealing to quantitative differences is surely a herring as red as Chairman Mao’s curtains.
I wish I had time to review all the responses to this thread.
I don’t, unfortunately, so I apologize in advance if I’m going over ground that has been covered since about 3/4 through the first page. I took the political compass test awhile ago and forgot exactly what i scored, but i think was near the 3, -3 range, more to the economic right and away from the authoritarian right.
I believe that comparing the sentience of a fetus with that of a pig is misleading and inappropriate for this discussion, for reasons that have already been mentioned. Is it moral to kill people who are stupider than pigs? Is it moral to kill a child whose brain is damaged enough that it will never reach normal human intelligence? Obviously not, and therefore “sentience” or “intelligence” should not be used as a measure of the morality in this issue.
Fetuses in some cases can be surgically removed, implanted in a woman’s uterus that is not the genetic mother, transported outside of a woman’s body, and still grow to become a child. Therefore the viability of a fetus outside of the mother’s body should not be an argument for abortion. It is not a “part of her” genetically any more than it is a “part of” the male. Pro choice defenders are in almost every case pro women’s choice, completely excluding the male who contributed half of the gentic material to the fetus, and are therefore arguably half-owners of this genetic clump of material. Would it be moral for the father (and not the mother) of this fetus to “choose” abortion?
In all I think this is a sticky situation. I don’t know exactly what I feel about it, because there’s no real convincing scientific answers for questions that I have. Aborting a child the day before its due date is very clearly murder in my mind, while aborting a child the day after conception is clearly not. In between is where it starts to get fuzzy.
My opinion may have something to do with the brain development of the child, and at which point the fetus has a brain capable of feeling pain. I imagine that this point is sometime after the fetus begins to look like a human child though. Eww.
I disagree with the statement in the political compass, mostly because I don’t believe that the government should have any authority in this matter in most cases. I do not strongly disagree, because I think that in a minority of abortion cases, the government can and should enforce abortion laws.
You do realize that this sort of reasoning can be used to justify racism and slavery. For example, if you’re caucasian, you cannot become black, therefore, you don’t care about the rights of blacks. Similarly, just because you can never become a fetus is no excuse for not treating them correctly.
I don’t understand why people can’t grasp that they are wrong about this. Even if every cell in my body can be turned into a human being by placing it into a cloning machine, the cell by itself is not a human being. Once placed in the cloning machine, however, and the process begins, and the first cell divisions begin, then that thing is on its way to becoming a human being, and should be treated appropriately.
Every piece of metal on earth can be turned into a jet engine. But, once I have taken a specific chunk of metal and actually made the jet engine, that former piece-of-metal is now a jet engine, and if you destroy it, I can accuse you of destroying my jet engine.
If you take away any other piece of metal from me I have no right to claim that you took my jet engine. Similarly, even though every piece of metal can be turned into a jet engine, it does not mean that every piece of metal on earth is as precious as a jet engine. Only the pieces that have actually been turned into jet engines are as precious as jet engines.
So, even though every cell in my body can be turned into a human being, only those that are actually chosen and have gone through the process are precious and have to be treated accordingly.
Is it clear now?
Actually, that idea isn’t too far out there. A study several years back postulated that crime rates were dropping because many potential criminals who were at a high risk to grow up and commit crimes had been aborted.
Cite, by the way: http://www.prospect.org/print/V12/1/abramsky-s.html