A fetus has a body that is under development, but I don't know that it has a mind, at least not a developed one. That aside, my point that a soul has never been discovered is still valid.
You don't know if he has a mind? "At 5-6 weeks the first electrical brain activity occurs." They have a brain from the start, so you can't really say they don't have minds. And you're kinda beating around the bush, but of course unborn babies have bodies.
Btw, do you believe in magic?
One minute after conception: not a baby
One minute before birth: a baby
When does it officially become a baby? I don't know. But I do know that terminating a pregnancy after one day and terminating it right before birth are clearly not the same thing, which is why I oppose partial birth abortion.
Having electrical activity in the brain is not the same as having a mind. Fish and frogs have electrical activity in their brains. Do they have minds? Also, they don't have brains "from the start". One day after conception there is no brain.
I think you do believe in magic because, just seconds before a baby is born, he is not a person, not even a human. He doesn't have a mind, doesn't have the right to live, and has no future. But, as soon as he is born *poof* he's magically all those things. Its about as logical as me walking through a door and *poof* I'm a frog
I'm glad (and grateful) my parents believed I had a mind, a future, a soul, and cared about me. I would never have been born. And how much more normal would the world have been? A lot.
You're completely misrepresenting what I said, which is a strawman fallacy.
I never said that seconds before birth, a baby is not a human.
I never said that it doesn't have a mind. I said that in the earliest stages of development, there is no mind because there is no brain.
I never said that seconds before birth, it doesn't have the right to live or a future.
I don't believe in magic and I didn't say what you're claiming I said. I said things about an early-stage embryo which you're claiming I said applied to a baby about to be born. That's false.
Seconds after conception, it is not a baby, it a fertilized egg. Seconds before birth, it is a baby. When exactly does it become a baby? I can't say. But I can say that a fertilized egg and a baby about to be born are two completely different things
I'm calling a fetus a child because in this context the difference is not relevant.
You are making a distinction between the two that is both arbitrary and subjective. Pro-abortion advocates cannot even decide among themselves precisely when one becomes the other, because it is purely arbitrary.
The fact that people can't even decide on it should tell you that it is a gray area. I'm making a distinction between a fetus and a five-year-old because there is clearly a difference between the two.
I don't think even pro-life proponents are as monolithic as you say. There are many people who oppose abortion, but will support exceptions in cases of **pe or incest, for example.
Both a five-year-old and a twenty-year-old are fully developed and have been born.
I keep pointing this out, and you keep failing to comprehend what I'm saying. You keep making distinctions between human developmental stages, and I keep saying that one stage is as good as another, and if it's okay to abort before the first trimester, then it should be just as okay to abort before the second birthday. The difference between those two points are equally random and equally valid.
Unborn, 6 months, five years, twelve years, it's all the same thing. It's an irrelevant distinction, because it's subjective and arbitrary. More human, less human. More developed, less developed, older, younger, none of that matters because "A" will always lead to "B", which will always lead to "C", and so on, and so on.
You can put the age of demarcation prior to which it is fine to euthanize but not after, wherever you wish and it will be equally valid. It's a made up number, randomly selected, a dart thrown at a timeline by a person wearing a blindfold.
We're both spinning our wheels and getting no place. I hope someone reads this conversation we're having here and gets some enlightenment out of it, because you and I are going nowhere with this conversation.
I love ya brother, but the amount of time I have allotted for banging my head against a wall has been used up.
Apparently not only do the points not matter, but accurate statistics don’t either. Makes one wonder about the whole page ranking system for memes on this site.
Life is used to justify the banning of guns, yet there are things all over this Country that take life faster, sometimes exponentially faster, than guns. And a majority of those things are treated as a 'fact of life' or 'a right that I have as a whatever'.
My main hang-up about abortion, besides the killing part, is when they say 'It's a woman's right' and all that. What about me as the father? Where are my rights?
If it comes down to: I want an abortion and she doesn't, I have to pay or go to jail. If I don't want the abortion and she does, it's her right to choose.
If through some action, I end the life of a fetus, I go to jail for murder. Even if that woman was going to abort. That's another messed up thing...
I also don't understand how an abortion can be considered more humane than abstinence. "Even with all the precautions, a woman can get pregnant." That's a choice you make knowing the consequences. Somehow, all the excuses that don't fly in nearly every other death situation are acceptable for abortion.
When did we start punishing a child for the crimes of his father? Nevermind, doesn't matter because you're still talking about less 2% of U.S. abortions. I'll trade you all the abortions performed as ex-post facto contraception, for all the 'pregnancy by **pe' abortions, even though I still think it's wrong, at least it's a place to start.
If you excepted all pregnancy by **pe (both statutory and actual), incest, and situations where the lives of the mother or child or both were in mortal danger, and only banned elective abortions of healthy fetuses (fetii?), you'd still ban 98% of all abortions performed in the United States.
In whole numbers, more abortions are performed because the baby isn't the gender the mother wants than because the pregnancy was the result of **pe.
These statistics, has been unapologetically provided by everyone's favorite pro-abortion think-tank; The Guttsmacher Institute.
It's not about punishing the child for the crime of the father. It's about a woman who gets pregnant after being **ped not having to carry that pregnancy to term. To say that a **ped woman can't get an abortion would be a horrible injustice, in my opinion.
You and I have very different definitions of "injustice". Also, what qualifies as "horrible", too.
We can go back and forth about whether or not a child should have to sacrifice its life because 9 months of its existence is a tragic reminder of a super-shitty experience until we're both blue in the face. Again, that scenario comprises a minuscule (read: very tiny) percentage of abortions.
You're talking about less than 1% of abortions. I'd much rather talk about the 98% of abortions, in which perfectly good human beings are washed down the sink because they were the wrong gender, or it just "wasn't the right time" to create a human life and then take responsibility for it.
In the majority of abortion cases, I support some but not all. I support an abortion at one week, because that is not a baby. I oppose partial birth abortion, however. Where do I draw the line? I don't know, exactly. But I do know that I draw it somewhere.
The problem I have with that line of reasoning, is this; It doesn't matter at what point in the gestation cycle you arbitrarily decide the human being in question suddenly becomes entitled to civil rights of any kind. Why is it irrelevant? Because if you keep your abortion-ey butcher knives off of it, it will eventually cross that threshold 99% of the time, no matter where you put it. One week? Eight and a half months? It's all the same.
Your entire statement of so full of ruthless semantics and subjectivity in regard to when it's "okay" to coldly exterminate a human being and when it isn't, it sounds like it could as easily be a quote from Simon Legree or Heinrich Himmler.
Except that one week after conception, it's hardly "coldly exterminating a hunan being". There is no heart, no brain and no central nervous system that can feel pain.
As far as civil rights go, I will admit that that should factor into the discussion, and I should think more about it.
But until it has those things, it's not a fully formed human, and it can't feel pain, terminating the pregnancy at that stage is not like killing a toddler
But if you don't terminate the person, they will eventually acquire all those criteria you named. The fact that you're beating a made-up clock doesn't change anything. We're just repeating ourselves at this point. How about this;
Would you pull the plug on a comatose patient on total life-support if the doctor told you they would wake up in nine months? Ten months? A year? That's what you're defending. You're making a evaluation based upon current conditions, and not taking predictable and virtually inevitable developmental changes into account.
I see the point you're making, but the key word is "eventually". Just because something has the potential to become something, that doesn't mean it is that thing. Like I said before, a fetus or embryo is a human *under development*, but not a fully formed one. I think the more important issue is not humanness but rather personhood. All human embryos have human DNA. The question is whether or not they are a person.
To answer your other question, if a doctor told me that someone on life support would revive in nine months or a year, then no, I wouldn't take them off life support. But it's apples and oranges, because the person on life support is a fully grown person.
"...something has the potential to become something, that doesn't mean it is..."
If an event condition (the point threshold at which your 'not-human' fetus becomes a human person) is functionally inevitable unless acted upon by an outside force (abortion), then preventing the condition prior to the event is the same thing for all intent and purpose as terminating the condition following the event.
It doesn't matter where the event condition occurs, nor does it matter what the state is, either before or after. Because the action of the outside force always ends in death, and the lack of action of the outside force almost always ends in the reaching of the event condition, at which point the non-human fetus becomes a human person.
"...apples and oranges, because the person on life support is a fully grown..."
It's round fruit. Something either fits all of your criteria, or it doesn't. You can't keep re-qualifying it because it doesn't shake out the way you want.
Actually both parties did, they had different approaches. Just to set the record straight, it didn't work out so well for everybody. As a single working dad, I lost access to anything worthwhile that I could afford. The 5k yearly deductible made it pretty much worthless unless I had cancer or a heart attack.
Re-caption this meme
Btw, do you believe in magic?
One minute before birth: a baby
When does it officially become a baby? I don't know. But I do know that terminating a pregnancy after one day and terminating it right before birth are clearly not the same thing, which is why I oppose partial birth abortion.
I do not believe in magic, why?
I never said that seconds before birth, a baby is not a human.
I never said that it doesn't have a mind. I said that in the earliest stages of development, there is no mind because there is no brain.
I never said that seconds before birth, it doesn't have the right to live or a future.
I don't believe in magic and I didn't say what you're claiming I said. I said things about an early-stage embryo which you're claiming I said applied to a baby about to be born. That's false.
Google "sorites paradox"
Your 4/5ths of an opinion is duly noted.
You are making a distinction between the two that is both arbitrary and subjective. Pro-abortion advocates cannot even decide among themselves precisely when one becomes the other, because it is purely arbitrary.
There's a difference between a five year-old and a twenty year old too, not sure how that is relevant.
Both a five-year-old and a twenty-year-old are fully developed and have been born.
Unborn, 6 months, five years, twelve years, it's all the same thing. It's an irrelevant distinction, because it's subjective and arbitrary. More human, less human. More developed, less developed, older, younger, none of that matters because "A" will always lead to "B", which will always lead to "C", and so on, and so on.
You can put the age of demarcation prior to which it is fine to euthanize but not after, wherever you wish and it will be equally valid. It's a made up number, randomly selected, a dart thrown at a timeline by a person wearing a blindfold.
We're both spinning our wheels and getting no place. I hope someone reads this conversation we're having here and gets some enlightenment out of it, because you and I are going nowhere with this conversation.
I love ya brother, but the amount of time I have allotted for banging my head against a wall has been used up.
My main hang-up about abortion, besides the killing part, is when they say 'It's a woman's right' and all that. What about me as the father? Where are my rights?
If it comes down to: I want an abortion and she doesn't, I have to pay or go to jail. If I don't want the abortion and she does, it's her right to choose.
If through some action, I end the life of a fetus, I go to jail for murder. Even if that woman was going to abort. That's another messed up thing...
I also don't understand how an abortion can be considered more humane than abstinence. "Even with all the precautions, a woman can get pregnant." That's a choice you make knowing the consequences. Somehow, all the excuses that don't fly in nearly every other death situation are acceptable for abortion.
/rantover
If you excepted all pregnancy by **pe (both statutory and actual), incest, and situations where the lives of the mother or child or both were in mortal danger, and only banned elective abortions of healthy fetuses (fetii?), you'd still ban 98% of all abortions performed in the United States.
In whole numbers, more abortions are performed because the baby isn't the gender the mother wants than because the pregnancy was the result of **pe.
These statistics, has been unapologetically provided by everyone's favorite pro-abortion think-tank; The Guttsmacher Institute.
We can go back and forth about whether or not a child should have to sacrifice its life because 9 months of its existence is a tragic reminder of a super-shitty experience until we're both blue in the face. Again, that scenario comprises a minuscule (read: very tiny) percentage of abortions.
You're talking about less than 1% of abortions. I'd much rather talk about the 98% of abortions, in which perfectly good human beings are washed down the sink because they were the wrong gender, or it just "wasn't the right time" to create a human life and then take responsibility for it.
Your entire statement of so full of ruthless semantics and subjectivity in regard to when it's "okay" to coldly exterminate a human being and when it isn't, it sounds like it could as easily be a quote from Simon Legree or Heinrich Himmler.
As far as civil rights go, I will admit that that should factor into the discussion, and I should think more about it.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with this. It's irrelevant. Leave it alone and it will acquire all those things. That's the point.
Would you pull the plug on a comatose patient on total life-support if the doctor told you they would wake up in nine months? Ten months? A year? That's what you're defending. You're making a evaluation based upon current conditions, and not taking predictable and virtually inevitable developmental changes into account.
To answer your other question, if a doctor told me that someone on life support would revive in nine months or a year, then no, I wouldn't take them off life support. But it's apples and oranges, because the person on life support is a fully grown person.
If an event condition (the point threshold at which your 'not-human' fetus becomes a human person) is functionally inevitable unless acted upon by an outside force (abortion), then preventing the condition prior to the event is the same thing for all intent and purpose as terminating the condition following the event.
It doesn't matter where the event condition occurs, nor does it matter what the state is, either before or after. Because the action of the outside force always ends in death, and the lack of action of the outside force almost always ends in the reaching of the event condition, at which point the non-human fetus becomes a human person.
"...apples and oranges, because the person on life support is a fully grown..."
It's round fruit. Something either fits all of your criteria, or it doesn't. You can't keep re-qualifying it because it doesn't shake out the way you want.
Support guns = pro-life