Seriously, folks. When do you consider a fetus to be sufficiently human to possess rights? Although fetuses develop at very similar rates, any criterion you develop would have to include testing whether the fetus involved had developed sufficiently to possess those rights.

As far as those who would place a complete ban on abortion, there is some Biblical support (no. Look it up yourself!) for the possibility of aborting an unborn child if there is a risk to the mother's life.

Seriously, until we get more members with a uterus, I think any debate on this topic would have to remain largely theoretical.

~~Baloo

Sol:

"I would usually recommend seeking out the source material."

My ancient Greek is a little rusty.

"unless your definition of human is purely genetic, unthinking embryos don't fit within it."

I don't attempt to define human. I simply extrapolate, based on what everyone (short of the few feminazis in the country) agrees is a human, and use a little legal logic.

"How you are extending it to include the statement that nonthinking entities are human is quite beyond me."

I wasn't refering to the actual question of Data's sentience. I was refering to the speech given by the presiding command officer (perhaps she was a capitan) when giving her ruling. She said the question was whether Data had a soul or not. Whether he was alive. She said she didn't know, but that she had to give HIM the chance to find out for himself. What IS the measure of a (hu)man? How can you say "This is the line"? If there is even the SLIGHTEST chance that something could be called a living human being, we have an obligation to let it become whatever it will.

"And yet you refuse to acknowledge extreme differences between an embryo and a fetus, and a fetus and a baby."

I acknowledge the differences. I simply think they're irrelevant. One is basically a more or less mature form of the others. A gamite is a completely seperate entity that will die within a couple weeks under any circumstances. It can never become a human on its own. An embryo can.

"Why is it that your argument is predicated upon abortion always being a clear cut moral issue involving only one person?"

Because those are the abortions we're talking about. Ones in which the mother's life is at stake we both seem to find acceptable, so there is no debate over them. The only one's we have any question over is where the mother has an abortion for the simple reason that she doesn't want the child.

"I merely pointed out that there are other cases where human lives are ended willfully that you do not seem to object to, rendering this point useless in this particular debate."

Wrong. Your analogy is inaplicable. The willful ending of a human life is not nesecarily wrong. You seem to like splitting hairs, but to humor you, let's tack a "defenceless" in there, and maybe an "innocent", too.

"You cannot concieve of an instance in which it is right for a doctor to perform an action and wrong for someone else?"

When it involves the death of an innocent being, no, I can't.

"then why must we treat them the same?"

Simple. All humans are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these is life.

*epiphany*

I've been going about this the wrong way. I don't have to proove anything.

Look at it this way. I take a rat to court, claiming that it has a right to life as a human being. How easy would it be to defeat that? It's easy to proove that a rat is not a human being, and therefore is not entitled to the applicable rights. But it must be _prooven_ that the rat is not a human being. The benefit of the doubt must be given. Otherwise, you could have someone claiming that other people aren't human, and they'd have to proove that they WERE.

In the case mentioned, it'd be incredibly simple to proove that a rat isn't human. In the case of an embryo, it's not. Pretend this is a court. You have the burden of proof. You must give me a compelling reason why an embryo is NOT human until a certain point. To do this, YOU have to define human.

The ball's in your court. Have fun.

If you look around the site, the author's opinion is essentially, "the world doesn't need your children," but with lots of profanity.

America has a general philosophy reguarding it's laws. In the debate of abortion America is not applying it's general philosophy to this issue. It's like being a Jew in one area and being a Christian in another part of your life. You can't do that!

You can't tell me a government wouldn't go nuts if a fetus was killed by a terrorist and lawyers wouldn't use that in court to get the highest penalty.

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If you don't believe in what I say or the God I speak of I guess you'll just have to meet me so the Lord and I can convert you.

Then I suppose it is a good thing that very few philosophical texts are written in it, no?

"I don't attempt to define human."

Then you are ignoring the central issue at hand.

"I simply extrapolate, based on what everyone (short of the few feminazis in the country) agrees is a human, and use a little legal logic."

I don't know if Godwin's Law applies to bulletin boards, but it should.

"If there is even the SLIGHTEST chance that something could be called a living human being, we have an obligation to let it become whatever it will."

Are you sure you want to say this? I fear your argument is going to be rapidly outpaced by reality in a few years. Will it be a crime to ruin our own stem cells? Demand that our barber collect our hair in a liquid nitrogen cooled chamber? We are rapidly reaching the point where we can make humans out of a lot of things. My viewpoint, it seems, makes some room for this sort of thing, by providing a reasonable definition of humanity to be applied to each new creation. Yours, on the other hand, and if you don't think this is true I'm sure you'll let me know, does not make such provisions. That is my main issue with it.

Another is that you seem comfortable with a sort of...well, perhaps we should coin a word here. A sort of ethical determinism. That is, you seem to be indicating that our actions now must have their rightness or wrongness decided based on what outcome they have five, or ten, or five hundred years in the future. I cannot help but reject this. Part of me agrees, of course, but I can't shake the little voice in the back of my mind demanding that such an ethical system is horribly unfair. It asks that we take into account every possible outcome of our actions in a universe that seems to make such a thing impossible. If, as you say, the "SLIGHTEST chance" is to be taken into account, not just in this but in all things, then we seem to reach a point beyond which action is impossible. Help this old woman across the street today, and she may run down a group of pedestrians later that she might have otherwise avoided had she not been able to cross in a timely manner. Or, to go back to something First said, by eating meat, I might be delaying the evolution of some future sentient species. (Actually, that's a bit misleading. More accurate would be to say that by engaging in actions that significantly alter a species, I am altering its future course of evolution, while acting just on a single individual most likely will not.)

So no, I am not willing to make my decisions solely based on what might occur in the future. I get the impression that this might be a deal breaker here.

"The only one's we have any question over is where the mother has an abortion for the simple reason that she doesn't want the child."

And what is that question, exactly? I have already stated that I don't believe them to be moral. I have also stated that the issues involved are so complex that the only two people really qualified to deal with them are the doctor and the woman involved.

"The willful ending of a human life is not nesecarily wrong."

You're the one who made an issue out of it in the first place!

"When it involves the death of an innocent being, no, I can't."

I'd like to know how you suggest doctors deal with instances where they have a number of gravely injured patients and can treat only a few in time.

"Simple. All humans are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these is life."

Oh, so it's a religious thing. Well, nevermind then. If it's a religious thing, then the thread is pointless, and what I've said so far will have to stand on its own.

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It's not my birthday
It's not today
It's not my birthday so why do you lunge out at me?
--
They Might Be Giants
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Read chapter one of "Dirk Tungsten in...The Disappearing Planet"! I'll give you a cookie.

Can anyone tell me, who has more rights, the growing zygote, or the person of which it is growing inside?

Both have the same rights. However, the right on the part of the embryo to exist is greater than the right of the mother to do as she pleases, especially since the child is there because of her actions in most cases. The child had no choice in the matter. The mother usually does.

Sol:

You're still not QUITE getting what I'm saying. Neither a gamite nor a clonable cell could, by any reasonable definition, be called human. The difference between them and an embryo is the same as the difference between an embryo and a gamite. Meaning extreme. Leave anything but the embryo alone, it dies. Leave the embryo alone, it may become a human. So why is it not considered to be so already?

"Oh, so it's a religious thing."

No, it's the way this country's legal system works. Get used to it.

Me: "The willful ending of a human life is not nesecarily wrong."

Sol: "You're the one who made an issue out of it in the first place!"

You missed the last part of that section of my post. I modified my statement to spell out "The willful ending of an innocent life in cold blood is wrong." Get it now?

So why not consider an embryo to be human? Your only reason is that it opens some sort of Pandora's box in which any clonable cell could be considered human. But I've already addressed that. If you define human being as including anything that could develop into an undisputed human being without outside interference, everything works out fine.

No. Leave the embryo ALONE, and it dies, too. Hook it up to its life-support system, and THEN it may become a human.

Sometimes, nature hooks it up, sometimes (perhaps just as often), it leaves it alone.

Similarly, take a clonable cell, and do nothing with it, and it dies. But attatch it to IT'S life-support system, and it'll live.

If we left fetuses alone, though, probably more of them would die on their own, too. Tampering works both ways. Should we simply let nature take its course? I wouldn't be here if we had -- although some of you MIGHT consider that a bonus.

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"Nobody knows this, but I'm scared all the time... of what I might do, if I ever let go." -- Michael Garibaldi

I think what Omega is trying to say, is that if an embryo follows its natural course, without artificial intervention, it has the ability to become a living being.

A clonable cell does not have this ability.

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"Nobody knows this, but I'm scared all the time... of what I might do, if I ever let go." -- Michael Garibaldi