No I’m not.
I glad I started this thread, I’ve learned a lot about the other side and I consider that a success. But once the personal attacks start its over for me, I’m not interested that kind of discussion.
I totally dig that. So…who started in with the personal attacks? 'Cuz I don’t really see any.
The batshitinsanometer wasn’t a personal attack?
In Bill’s defense, he was provoked by a robust assault of batshit insanity.
True.
From my perspective this is the stopping block in this debate – you insist on viewing a fetus as the same as a baby or adult.
Consider this: there are about 950,000 neurons in a honey bee’s brain. You suggest a blastocyst, the period after conception, which consists of a miniscule 70-100 cells, should be on some level considered a human being. Ignoring the later stages of development for a second, this shows your “human starts at conception” view to be patently incorrect. 100 cells is not and cannot be human.
So you admit that your view is an emotional, not scientific or rational one? Because by your logic terminating that miniscule cluster of cells would be killing a human. Why?
(This is an attempt to make the debate more constructive – I am well aware actual abortion takes place a long time after the blastocyst stage.)
Overturning Roe vs Wade would not save lives.
Rich (white) girls would still be able to get their abortions in Massachusetts or New York. What’s a poor (black) girl in Atlanta to do? She can’t just drive to Massachusetts. So she goes the illegal route. Unfortunately, the guy performing the back alley hack job can’t stop the bleeding when he zigs when he should zag and she dies three days later.
I’m not stating a worst case scenario. It’ll happen. It has happened.
Of course, your fairyland suggestion is that she shouldn’t have the abortion in the first place. 'Cept when you’re that fifteen year old girl with a baby brewing inside of you and no way to deal with actually carrying it to term much less raising a child, the issues of morality and legality can quickly go out the window.
Not to mention the massive number of pregnancies at this stage that just miscarry on their own, before the woman is even aware she was pregnant, without any form of intervention. I’m not sure how you counter emotional, pseudo-religious arguments exactly(other than yelling LOUDER), but God must be a complete cocksucker to magically imbue every single little blastocyst with a soul and then immediately turn around and kill most of them with little bullshit procedural hurdles.
Yes unfortunately that is always the point at which both sides will never agree.
Consider this: there are about 950,000 neurons in a honey bee’s brain. You suggest a blastocyst, the period after conception, which consists of a miniscule 70-100 cells, should be on some level considered a human being. Ignoring the later stages of development for a second, this shows your “human starts at conception” view to be patently incorrect. 100 cells is not and cannot be human.
Because if it were not for those first 100 cells we wouldn’t be, yes its primitive human life but life none the less.
So you admit that your view is an emotional, not scientific or rational one?
I personally cant debate from a scientific position so yes you could say my position is more emotional, but to me my view is rational.
Because by your logic terminating that miniscule cluster of cells would be killing a human. Why?
There is only one way for a human being to become and that is through conception. You’ve heard the terms life will find a way or will grab hold? You hear it all the time right? We’ve found life on the bottom of the deepest oceans where we thought life couldn’t exist but life found a way. When Conception occurs a new human life starts grabbing hold independent of the mother will as Bill pointed out, to me thats a sign of humanity fighting to survive trying to find a way to live.
Counting brain cells is missing the point. People have very strong emotional triggers and attachments around their young. If you want to change people’s minds you need to make an emotional argument, not a scientific one.
I don’t see how this is a rational argument. Emotional yes, but not rational. Just because those 100 cells are our precursor and are potential human life does not mean they possess intrinsic value. I don’t want to sound cold-hearted - I absolutely understand the emotional attachment to new life no matter what the stage of development, especially for the mother - but that attachment is purely emotional. There is not the slightest shred of sentience, consciousness or even individual identity (beyond genetic identity) in those 100 cells.
If your argument is that it is a potential human how do you answer Glenn’s point that nature continually “aborts” blastocysts?
What I’m saying is your insistence that anything after conception is as human as you, I, or a baby is downright silly, not to mention degrading of the whole concept of human worth. If human life is to be treasured it can’t be put on the level of a cluster of 100 cells.
It’s an almost poetic emotional reaction and I don’t begrudge you it. But it is simply emotional. There is no semblence of humanity “struggling” at that point, only the genetic programming kicking in. Which, in my opinion, doesn’t make it any less wonderful. But it is still a cluster of cells, not especially different from any animal or insect’s first stage of life.
I went down the scientific track for two reasons. The first because the emotional arguments clearly weren’t working. The second because the scientific facts - y’know, what actually is - are kind of important.
Once upon a time you too were a cluster of 100 cells. It’s total baloney to suggest that a human blastocyst is not ‘human’. Of course it is fucking human. There’s no process by which a baby newt or dolphin or pine tree pops out after 9 months.
This is one angle that I don’t get from the pro-choice camp. Why is there so much semantic mincing around the ‘personhood’ of a fetus? Yes, it’s technically an aggregate of cells. So are you. It’s not capable of conscious thought. Neither are you when you’re asleep.
Sigh. I said “as human” which implies a judgement of worth and moral obligation to preserve. I was also specifically talking about a 100 cell blastocyst, not a fetus.
I don’t see how the moral imperative created by a pre-human is any less than that of a non-womb-dweller.
A blastocyst, or fetus, or whatever it is beneath the cutoff line that you’ve yet to define, probably does not have “sentience, consciousness or even individual identity”, but it probably will if you tolerate its parasitism for 9 months.
Hypothetical situation - You fall into a coma for nine months. Doctors assure your family that your body and mind will function normally at the close of the coma, but are also certain that you will have no recollection of the life you’ve led before entering the coma. You will have to relearn motor skills, language, facial recognition, everything. You will re-enter the world as a naive infant in an adult’s body.
Given that your sentience, consciousness, and individual identity have been obliterated, does your family have any moral obligation to preserve your life?
I don’t know about a moral one, but perhaps a civic one.
Protip: you don’t die when you go to sleep.
Yes, such is the current law. But since you seem to be arguing that the sovereign cannot make, say, adultery or blasphemy illegal, I was wondering what additional requirement the sovereign has to meet in order to write any moral conviction into law, according to your political philosophy. Why can’t he legislate anything he deems prudent?
I don’t think that contradicts my interpretation, because having to care for the special needs of a premature child is a direct burden on the woman, whereas your interpretation fails to adequately explain why the provisions for ‘further harm’ are there at all; they’d be redundant if they refer to the mother. But we’re talking about thin air at this point, as we haven’t even established which textual tradition should be authoritative here. Keep in mind that the Septuagint, rendering ‘harm’ as ‘form’ here, does refer the conditional clause to the miscarried child, and its authors knew ancient Hebrew and Greek better than you or me.
Even if I granted a lot of the presuppositions, that would at best amount to an argument from silence, which are always very weak.
Yes, and this feature of modern English seems to lead many of its native speakers to such enthusiastic and overreaching conclusions once they discover grammatical gender in other languages. This is on one level with asserting the third person of Trinity is feminine because the Hebrew word for ‘spirit’ is grammatically feminine, or that Germans have misogynistic tendencies because their word for ‘girl’ is grammatically neutral. However, grammatical gender and biological gender have nothing to do with each other. Attempting to draw sweeping anthropological conclusions from the grammatical gender of some relative pronoun is simply out of the question.
It’s prooftexting on a level that I just don’t think is productive. For every poetic verse you throw into a ring, I can throw you a ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you’ or ‘he was called a transgressor from the womb’. All those verses have one thing in common: They’ve been taken out of context, and their authors did not intend them as anthropological or moral statements, which is why I don’t think they can serve as one.
Which was the point of the hypothetical; apparently I didn’t make it as clear as I intended.
With the hypothetical, I was granting you your premise for the sake of the argument: Let us say, biological facts notwithstanding, I don’t know what Adam / the embryo is at that moment, and neither do you. However, that’s still just a question of speculative anthropology, and what I was trying to point out was that whatever the answer is, it cannot affect the moral question of whether you and I are allowed to interfere with whatever mysterious stage God has reached there in His creative work. If all your exegetical theories are correct (and, frankly, they’re really far-fetched), the most you have proven is that I am wrong to call abortion manslaughter or murder. You have not proven that it is licit.
What I have expressed has been the common legal opinion for the better part of our history as a culture. You aren’t insulting me, you are insulting your own heritage; further proof of a complete deracination.
The only evidence I have ever seen cited for this remarkable claim was a study which found a rise in the level of chorionic gonadotropin, a hormone observed during pregancy, with no corresponding implantation for a ‘massive number’ of women. To draw from this the conclusion you state, one must reason like this:
If ‘conception’, then ‘chorionic gonadotropin’.
‘Chorionic gonadotropin’.
Therefore, ‘conception’.
Which is also known as affirming the consequent.