This puts a whole new meaning on Spidey’s actual name, you realize!
Honest question: Given that both sperm and egg are living cells separately, and aren’t noticably different after fusing for quite sometime (other than dividing), why is your definition of the beginning of life not just as arbitrary as saying life begins at birth, or at the point where a fetus could survive outside the womb?
I’m not saying your position is necessarily wrong, I’m just curious whether you believe it to be as arbitrary as any other, as Polycarp states.
Wait, you mean the post that myself and countless other posters have already responded to? You haven’t responded to a single person who has pointed out the fallaciousness of your argument.
Sam
First of all, polycarp you are usually smarter than this: “Rick, follow this logic: if it’s a life, and produced by human reproduction, it’s a human being, which means that it’s entitled to the full spectrum of rights we grant human beings in this country – which means you should be out there getting voting rights for fetuses, following the logic”
As someone said before fetuses don’t vote neither inmates or children.
I am not pro choice. In order to accept abortion I would need uncontroversial scientific proof that until a given number of weeks a fetus does not have the ability to think or to feel. Granted, I didn’t do a lot of reserch but I believe that we don’t really know.-
A fetus is at least a potential human being, as that it should have some rights.
One of the best ways to test an argument is to take it to the extreme, and see if it falls apart. If human beings have inherent rights, then all human beings have rights, not merely those who have attained a given age – and if fetuses are human beings, they have the same rights as the humans who have been born.
Obviously, a 30-year-old is much more able to make decisions about his or her own destiny than a 3-year-old. So we extend them different levels of rights. I continue that process by examining the rights of the unborn.
And I note that another person’s rights and responsibilities – the mother who is required to nurture that unborn fetus within her body – are affected.
I’m not arguing in favor of abortions – I’m arguing in favor of allowing the person who is responsible for giving that child life to make the decision as to whether she is willing to subject her body to the necessary processes to do so. I would hope that in general she would decide to do so – but I am strongly against compelling her to do so.
Have to admit, the logic of the “responsibility” argument has always escaped me. A woman finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy, so she undergoes a safe surgical procedure to end it. Sounds responsible enough to me. Being irresponsible would be denying the problems and having a child she can’t financially or emotionally support.
Besides, if we’re to deny medical care to someone in the name of teaching them responsibility, why treat injuries that result from skydiving, rollerblading and other risky recreational activities? Broke your leg while mountain climbing? Well, we could fit you with a cast, but then you wouldn’t learn your lesson. Better to let the leg just dangle until gangrene sets in. Maybe next time you’ll know better.
Oh, he’s never going to answer. That’s not what he does. I should know, I shouted into the wind for quite a while in his GD thread about thinness in hollywood. If you disagree with him or ask him questions, he just responds by accusing you of not reading the thread, or responding to the wrong part of his post, or not getting what he meant. Not that he’ll clarify. He’ll just tell you that you missed his point, which sometimes turns out to be a different topic than what he said in the OP. And to him, limited personal anecdote = indisputable factual truth. Because he said so.
It’s enough to make your ears bleed. Just give up now.
The choice is hers, not yours. Its not your body carrying the fetus. You had the pleasure of sex, no pain involved, no disfigurment involved (unless you’re doing it waaay wrong.) She is choosing to allow calcium to sucked from her bones, her body to be misshapened (is that a word?). Her back hurts, her ankles swell, she can’t sleep on her stomach, or her back (or her sides) yet she is making the choice to allow this to continue for 40 weeks (give or take.)
You sir, only lost a teaspoon of semen. Its just not your call, man. Pro life, pro choice. It just ain’t for yours to decide. All you have to do is pay the dues you owned when you f***ed her.
All I have to say.
Don’t a fair percentage of pregnancies spontaneously abort; i.e., miscarry? Should not the products of these miscarriages then be entitled to proper burials? Bear in mind that sometimes this happens before the woman knows she is pregnant, and sometimes it happens in such a way, to put it delicately, that the products (or persons, if you will), are unrecoverable. What is to be done about these cases, if they are in fact human beings who have died? Should we demand frequent pregnancy tests of all sexually active women whe are potential child-bearers so as to reassure society that non of its members will die unnoticed? Should their daily expulsions of bodily fluids be gathered up and tested for human life? I think not, but I welcome your thoughts on the matter.
Exactly my point as regards testing by reductio ad extremum. We might add all adolescent males are presumptively guilty, contrary to the standard legal principle, on the “98% admit it and 2% lie” rule, of destroying half of thousands of potential conceptions daily.
Clearly Americans are not prepared to insist that all persons of child-engendering age hop to it and begin engendering children immediately, from menarche to menopause and from first ejaculation to death. So clearly gametes are not yet people.
Now, presume a couple to have had intercourse and conception to have occurred – and it’s a few minutes later. We have a conceptus in the Fallopian tube – a single fertilized ovum, which has not yet begun mitosis. Is it a person?
If not, when does it become a person? After the first cell division? At the blastocyst stage? When it lodges on the uterine wall? When tissue begins differentiation? If there’s a precise moment when it does, what is that moment, and what is the rationale for choosing that moment?
Me, I think that a new life begins at conception, and personhood begins at “quickening” – but full fundamental rights accrue at independent viability. The logic behind the first is simple definition-of-individual-creature logic. In organisms with alternation of generations, the sporophyte, medusa, or whatever the product of sexual reproduction is called, is considered to begin separate existence at fertilization of the ova. The second is the traditional definition, prior to the entire abortion argument. And the last is logically the point at which the individual’s existence is not dependent on the continued consent of the mother to allow it to reside within her womb – granted, it will require special care in an incubator in a preemie-neonatal ward, but it’s not absolutely dependent on her alone.
Y’all are forgetting the rights of the unborn fetus.
First, there’s the right to child-support from the father. After all, the unborn have needs, too, like food and entertainment and education. For instance, if the pregnant mother needs a complete new sound system so she can play Mozart to the unborn fetus, clearly the father needs to provide that support. Or if the pregnant mother wants to take the unborn to a south sea island for a few weeks of sun and relaxation, the father needs to provide that, too. It’s only fair.
Then there’s the right to freedom of choice. Notice how those pro-choice folks don’t give any free choice to the unborn! No, not them, those hypocrites! They keep the unborn locked up in a small, cramped, womb for nine months, and there was no trial or sentencing, no rights of the unborn to cry out for liberty. What if the unborn doesn’t want to be stuffed into that little womb? And even if it does, it should certainly be granted the right to be taken out of the womb every so often for a little fresh air and exercise – why, we allow the worst murderer and child-rapists in jail to do that, but we forbit such freedoms to the unborn!
And the right to vote, of course, is denied to the unborn, so they have no fair representation. You may think this is silly, but let me point out that the DEAD continue to vote in many of our jurisdictions: so, we are granting a right to the dead that we forbid the unborn?
Hypocrisy, hypocrisy, I cry!
Obviously you have thought more deeply on this than I have, and I appreciate your comments. I was not trying to restate your premise, although I see now that I did just that. Rather, I was trying to set up a real world situation with a very limited scope (the question of how to handle deaths of extremely young fetuses) rather than advance an argument rhetorically that might be more easily attacked. I am hoping for a response from Bricker. I seldom agree with him but to me his arguments seem intelligent and well thought out. I also believe that the question I raised has real implications that must be addressed.
I submit to the panel:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?postid=4547402#post4547402
Yay! I got to start my very own semantic argument! Diogenes goes on to debate whether the fetus is a person, which is the core of the abortion debate. But I still want to say this, even though it’s been admitted to that a fetus is alive. Argue about this next paragraph all you want, but please don’t argue that I shouldn’t have stated it. I’m the OP dambit and I wanna say my piece! 
(wah)
You know Polycarp you are right about a fertilized egg being a life. I never thought about it this way, but any cell that replicates is by definition alive. It begins replicating after fertilization, and that is why we believe that conception is the moment that the life is created, because, well, it is. Now as to whether it is human… hmm… well it has all the DNA of a human, right? Does that make it human? I’d say it does. Anyone want to disagree? I’d like to hear one of you on this scientifically based discussion group say that a cell that divides and contains human DNA isn’t a human cell. Now, hmmm. What else is there? It’s a human life. Does this not follow from the two assumptions stated above? As to whether it has “rights” to live off of it’s “host”, that’s the debate, but please people don’t insult me or yourselves by saying the newly fertilized egg isn’t a human life.
Sure I have! My second post was a response to the Diogenes response to my apparantly vague OP. Maybe I didn’t specifically say “Diogenes the Cynic: this is for you!” But it was a responses. I was trying to clarify with some additional evidence. And you know, sometimes a body gets busy and can’t answer for days and by the time he gets around to it the debate has just gotten way out of hand and off topic. Not trying to make excuses but that has surely happened to many of us from time to time.
And Obsidian I apologize if I have given that opinion. I respond all the time, and admittedly I do chive a lot of people for not reading the thread because, well, it’s plainly obvious that they don’t. Witness this discussion. So far, not a single person has responded to my claim that when Pro-life dopers say if you have sex you should accept your potential parental responsibility, pro-choice dopers cry foul, like this. At best pro-choicers say it’s MORE responsible to NOT have the baby, like you all are doing in this discussion. But the link that is in the OP and the links in the 4th post show many pro-choicers preach clearly that sex comes with inherent potential consequences of becoming a parent. How about that? Please people. Where are your responses to that? That’s what I was looking for. And I always clarify. I stop clarifying after awhile though because beating on a brick wall just gets too tiring, like in the thin hollywood discussion. I admit that I might not be the best debater here at GD, but a little patience please. My points are still valid.
Is that the best you can do? I said a fetus is alive, therefore I must think it’s a “life.”
You are a dumb shit and your OP is stupid and it doesn’t matter if a fetus is alove. It’s still not a person and it’s still not a “life” in the sense that you meant in your fucktard OP.
A fingernail has human DNA, that doesn’t make a fingernail a “human.”
This paragraph is mostly incoherent raving. Would you care to provide a cite that pro-choicers have said that abortion is necessarily more responsible than having a baby (sometimes it is, though, it depends on the circumstances.)
What we have said is that we resp[ect the choice either way, and if the woman makes the CHOICE to carry the pregnancy to term, then the father is on the hook for all parental responsibilities. There is no contradiction there.
I’ll say it slow for you, Gomer. It’s like this. If a man has vaginal intercourse with a woman he knows there is a risk of pregnancy. He also knows that should a woman choose to carry that pregnancy to term that he will have to accept responsibility for that child.
What;s the fucking problem?
Rick, to be fair, I don’t see anyone campaigning for the voting rights of children.
prisoner
Following that line of logic how about responding to my post above (#49) until Bricker comes along.
Actually DtC, did you read what you were arguing against before? The person you were arguing with said it was a life, and you countered by saying that no one said it wasn’t alive. Here, I’ll quote the whole paragraph:
Sound like you admitting that a fetus is a life to me. Or are you willing to admit that in that argument you argued A=B, therefore B=/=C. (chicken = life therefore fetus =/= alive) Either way, you lose.
And you are just a sourpuss.
Did you read? Yep I did it again Obsidian because DtC is too histerical to actually read before he responded. All he did was stop where I said the egg was human and didn’t go on. Human DtC, is an adjective, as well as a noun. Ok? Comprende? The fingernail is indeed a human cell. Does it divide? No. But a fertilized egg does, so it’s alive. I said it’s a human cell Now who’s being a nitwit?
Well, I did give a cite, but I suppose that wasn’t good enough for you. Pro-choice dopers here have this uncanny ability to ignore arguments they want to avoid and substitue points that they want to make instead. Like in the cite I gave, Mambo said that abortion is responsibility avoidance. Rather than commenting on that, the responses were “it’s a responsibility to abort the baby.”
I’d also like to point out that no one has responded to my question, “is the choice in pro-choice (also) a decision as to whether the fetus is a baby to the mother?”
You know what DtC? I’m just going to pretend that you don’t exist from now on. It will serve both of us for the better. You might think about it too. God be with you.
Whoops that should be
“you argued A=B, therefore C=/=D”
Actually you said it’s a human **life ** and how about answering my question?
Personally, I believe that every body deserves a chance. But no. All of your cases are just argumentative. The fetus dying in those cases is an act of nature, not man. (And none of this man IS nature stuff, k?) Man intervenes in an abortion.
And I’d like to point out the cruelty that the pro-choice camp is having on women that have miscarriages. Well this happened to a friend of mine’s friend. She had a miscarriage, and the doctor explaining what happened and what would have to happen next called it a clump of cells. It wasn’t a clump of cells to her!!! It was her dead baby! How about some compassion!
Now I’m not saying that ALL doctors would tell a woman her dead fetus is just a bunch of cells. But the increasing belief that a fetus is just a bunch of cells didn’t help. I’m sure this is more common now than it was 50 years ago.