End Bringer,
Pro-abortionists often try to cloud the issue with questions as we've seen: What is a human being? Which is in no small way like asking what is a dog? Or what is a cat? If they don't know, then they are essentially going about with the attitude to kill something without the faintest clue of what it is.It is a relevant question, for those of us who lack the comforting certainties of faith. Yes, we're all pretty sure we know what a cat is, but would we consider a feline embryo at two-days gestation to be a cat? That would be a little odd. Your logic manages to prove that a caterpillar is a butterfly, an acorn is an oak tree, and a tadpole is a frog. i think we could agree that in all these cases there is a relationship, but not that the two are one and the same. Many people may feel the same about the humanity of embryos.
However the issue of humanness is an arguement that has long been over. It is an irrefutable fact that a human is created from the moment of conception. Terms like 'fetus' and such only refer to a human's age from the point of conception. Of course as I said in the other thread, pro-abortionists simply don't care that the debate is over.If the debate is over, what are you doing here? Your performance to date has involved invoking your own personal certainties on the issue, padded out by cheap emotional appeals to slippery slopes leading to the holocaust. i keep expecting you to throw in the Beethoven fallacy for good measure. Forgive me if i'm not convinced.
David,
It seems to me that if one doesn't consider these as a possibility then that would be question begging. Surely you agree that these are possibilities?The problem is the way you approach the question. In the same way as if i ask "When did you stop beating your wife?", there are assumptions contained within the quadrillema, and that is what you specifically fail to address. Your assumption is that all embryos/foetuses are at the same level of personhood. You need to support this assumption with something a little stronger than 'it is an irrefutable fact...'.
Yeah, every biology textbook before '73 taught that life begins at conception. It does.How is that relevant? If you or i become brain-dead then our physical 'life' will continue, but little of our 'personhood' would remain. You are confusing (or deliberately equivocating) the term 'life' with 'humanity'.
One does not become a human gradually, either. If that were true, then it would follow that it is not so bad to kill a child than to kill a teenager, since the teenager has all of its biological systems in place. But everybody knows that it is just as bad to kill a child as a teenager.That does not follow. The lack of a change in status in one part of a continuum does not rule out the possibility of change in other parts. You might as well say "One does not acquire the right to vote gradually because everybody knows that a forty-year old is entitled to vote in just the same way as a fifty-year old".
So one must become a person suddenly. At birth? The scissors that cut the umbilical make you a person? Obviously ludicrous.i agree that it would be nice if there was a single moment when one 'became a person', but that doesn't necessarily mean that there is one. i suspect that it is not unlike asking 'when does a work of art become a work of art?'. Is it with the final brush-stroke? That can't be right, otherwise unfinished paintings by great artists would not be worth so much money. At what point then?
Again, i think you are acting like the issue is simple when it is anything but.
At viability? Technology makes you a person? In the african jungle you are not a person but in the occident you are?It is not technology that makes you a person if we consider the issue of viability, because the medical advances of the last twenty-five years have noticably failed to lower the limit of viability. There is a point at which a baby born will probably survive, and before which it will almost definitely not survive, that's all. The science is irrefutable.
Bullcrap. You become a person when you get your genetic code. Conception. Sure, an embryo does not have a brain. But it's doing something that only a human can do: growing a human brain.You are forced to invoke the Potential argument here, because at a few days gestation there is essentially no difference between an embryo and any other tiny clump of cells in the body. The only difference you can invoke to make it a person when the rest are not is
what it could become. Now i am actually sympathetic to that argument (in fact i tried to raise it in the other, now-demolished, thread, only to have scorn poured on it from the lofty altitudes of End Bringer's high-horse), but the problem with it is that there are numerous pre-conditions necessary for an embryo to become a baby, and only one additional pre-condition necessary for an ovum to become one (i.e. a spermatazoa). You need to make the case for why that single pre-condition is more important than all the others.
At the bottom of it is this: Pro abortionists don't care. They just don't care.Insults and cheap emotional appeals are always the sign of a good argument.
