Mm. Good point. I’ll have to be on the lookout with future views of his cartoons.
- “Jack”
I thought Cecil did a nice job looking at the question of when human life begins, but I think even he concedes that this is not the same as the question of when that life should have the same legal protections as people who have been born. To answer that question, I think we have to first grapple with the ethical question, WHY is extrajudicial killing (however defined) prohibited in every reasonably functional society (even without reference to the Judeo-Christian “thou shalt not kill”), and do those reasons have any applicability whatsoever to, say, a blastocyst? If possible, we need to avoid dogmatic reasons because, for one, even secular socieities prohibit murder. So, “God says so” is perhaps a sufficient, but certainly not a necessary reason for not killing people who are inconvenient.
Here are the reasons that I have come up with in my own ruminations:
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In a society where our lives were not legally protected, we could never feel personally secure. We all want to feel secure, so by way of social contract, we agree to prohibit murder.
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Most human lives are valuable to someone – a mother, a spouse, siblings, friends, neighbors. Taking a life can be viewed as the theft of someone’s presence from someone else who will grieve and suffer for that loss. A civilized society is motivated at least in part by empathy. That is, we mentally put ourselves in the shoes of others and imagine the pain we would feel if someone we cared about were taken from us. So again, our social contract prohibits murder even of children who are not mature enough to feel the insecurity covered under (1). And because the law cannot (and should not) make subjective distinctions between those whose loss would truly be felt by someone and the rest (e.g., a homeless person), we prohibit killing of anyone.
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Even if we know that no one else would be impacted by the loss of a particular human being, and even if that person is not sufficiently aware to feel concern for his/her own security, we still imagine the pain and terror of being killed. Our civilized society protects the weak among us from that fate, because some of us at least can empathize with the victim him-/herself. But we only have empathy with those whom we can truly imagine swapping places with. Most of us don’t have much empathy with cattle; therefore only a relatively few folks agitate for legal protections for cattle, even though cattle are just as much alive as humans.
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The final argument I can think of is that we don’t want to get comfortable with doing violence to things that are unquestionably close to us. For most westerners, it’s much easier to raise and slaughter cattle for food than it would be chimpanzees or gorillas, because we see something of ourselves in the latter. For that reason, I would have real problem with late-term abortions, since the distinction between “fetus” and “baby” becomes quite thin in the third trimester. But which is closer to us in appearance and sentience, a cow or a blastocyst? I would argue the cow. So this particular argument would offer great protections to cattle than blastocysts.
All other arguments that I have heard make dogmatic references to “right to be born”, to souls, and what have you. None of these concepts carry weight except with the folks who already accept them. The “right to be born” in particular would imply a moral urgency to procreate as much as humanly possible, regardless of the circumstances. An impoverished woman in Somalia would be morally obliged to continue bearing children, even if they were destined for starvation within weeks of being born.
So what are the real objective ethical issues in preventing a fertilized ovum from being implanted in the womb (e.g., using a “morning after pill”), inasmuch as a great many fertilized ovi fail to implant anyway for natural reasons? And who really feels deep loss over the early termination of an unwanted pregnancy, if not the woman making that choice? And who can imagine “what it feels like” to be a blastocyst, and who can therefore empathize with that blastocyst more readily than we do with, say, a cat, a dog, or a cow?
Older than that, I should think, depending on when ova form.
All the ova my daughter will ever have were formed when she was in my uterus. They’re only half-baked, of course, and will “ripen” one at a time when she hits puberty. Still, it’s kinda mindboggling to think that I literally carried half of my grandbabies’ bodies inside me. :eek:
- Identical twins, triplets, quadruplets etc: this is where the fertilized egg splits and give rise to genetically identical humans. In the religious sense, these individuals must have their own soul, not parts of souls dependent on how many divisions/splits occurred.
- Chimeric individuals: this is where two eggs are fertilized by separate sperm and instead of forming two separate individuals, the cell masses (clumps of normally dividing fertilized eggs) fuse together at some pre-embryonic (relatively undifferentiated state) and only 1 embryo develops with mixed DNA. Obviously, this person cannot have two souls. These individuals cannot be DNA tested in the conventional way, since DNA in different parts of their body will be from one or the other original fertilized egg. The person looks normal (although skin pigmentation patterns can be odd); this is not what happens for “Siamese twins”.
The soul, assuming a soul exists, could only enter the unborn at some point after it is no longer possible for either post-fertilization splitting (twinning etc.) or fusing (chimeric individual formation) to take place.
- Identical twins, triplets, quadruplets etc: this is where the fertilized egg splits and give rise to genetically identical humans. In the religious sense, these individuals must have their own soul, not parts of souls dependent on how many divisions/splits occurred.
- Chimeric individuals: this is where two eggs are fertilized by separate sperm and instead of forming two separate individuals, the cell masses (clumps of normally dividing fertilized eggs) fuse together at some pre-embryonic (relatively undifferentiated state) and only 1 embryo develops with mixed DNA. Obviously, this person cannot have two souls. These individuals cannot be DNA tested in the conventional way, since DNA in different parts of their body will be from one or the other original fertilized egg. The person looks normal (although skin pigmentation patterns can be odd) if the original fertilized eggs are the same gender. If a male-female chimera happens then usually one gender predominates or the individual is hermaphroditic and carries features of both genders. Not all Hermaphrodites are chimeric. Transgenders are not necessarily chimeric; since the transgender phenomenon has various origins, not all of which are known. Also, Chimeras are not ‘Siamese twins’.
The soul, assuming a soul exists, could only enter the unborn at some point after it is no longer possible for either post-fertilization splitting (twinning etc.) or fusing (chimeric individual formation) to take place, likely sometime in the first week after conception.
Reponse to goodma82’s question: So is a cancer cell a different organism when it begins to exhibit a different genome than its host?
A cancer cell has the exact same genome as the host, except that a transcription error has occurred which was not corrected and which disrupts the regulatory mechanism limiting cell division. This means that the cancer cell may divide and grow rapidly outpacing cell growth of their neighboring cells or their mother cell. A cancer cell cannot develop into a separate organism (if taken out of the host and fed cell culture nutrients, it typically just keeps dividing and growing) and therefore is not a separate entity from its host.
What about HeLa cells? A HeLa cell (or possibly a colony of them) is at least as much a “separate organism” as is anything else which grows in a Petri dish.
…At what point can a pre-born act as a sacrifice in a Satanic ritual? Third trimester?
Using Biology life began eons ago. Life is a passed on thing. Even if one believes the Creation story human life began with Adam and Eve. Passed on from generation to generation. If death means the leaving of the soul from the body, then where did life go?
No live sperm, no new human, so life is passed on through the sperm and egg.
Monavis
This also raises the question of what happens when a twin is born as part of the other? Some babies have been born with extra legs some have extra eyes and mouths etc. one baby had part of her twin still wedged inside her body.
Is this also a human being? I mean the parts.
Monavis
It seems to depend on whether the extra parts include a functioning head or not.
Powers &8^]
Grant2 said:
That question is also being posed in the other “Life Begins…” thread.
Another reason comes from a scientific understanding of mental capacity, awareness, and the ability to feel pain. The more able to feel pain and the more aware of its status as a mortal being, the more immoral we view the killing. That is why most of us view chimpanzees differently than houseflies. Or cucumbers.
Yet, chimpanzees,cucumbers and horseflies all contain ‘Life’ .The question of when human life began is depending on if one believes in evolution or the Bible story. All began eons ago.
Monavis
Nice post Grant2. That is the ultimate question all right. I’m off to have a look at this other thread Irishman mentions too…
According to the manual, sperm is not to be spilled on the ground. This indicates a sanctity of life that exists even at that stage. I just saying, this is closer to the truth than any comment I’ve seen prior to it.
Yeah I know I must be an ignorant redneck because I have faith and I believe in a Supreme being. It’s really not a crime to be moral you know, at least not yet. 
How do you ask this question? If you are born without body parts are you human
? There really is no difference, and duh… who says a twin egg doesn’t carry two souls?
Most people’s objections to abortion and to anti-gay marriage both seem to stem from religious feelings.
This question may be better for GQ, but why do we allow religious motivations behind laws? Didn’t we have a separation of church and state? When we allow religion to create laws, aren’t we allowing religion to rule the state?
In the months leading up to this election, a lot of people at work and friends have talked about their feelings on these two topics. Whenever someone is against abortion or against gay marriage, I ask their reasons, and very nearly 100% of the time it’s religious.
Okay I have to throw this at you… why isn’t it possible that the existence of only one soul would cause the chimera process to occur.
What motivates acceptance of abortion?