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Originally Posted by GldnRule
Obviously, for all of human history...women have bore young...and mostly in what modern society would consider terrible conditions...and that's still common in many parts of the world today. Most didn't/don't abort...
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As a statistic pointing out that through most of history most women did not abort is a bit of a non-point. Safe medical abortion was not an option for most of "human history" and is only a recent development, so it is sort of a non-point to mention that women did not avail of an option that they never actually had.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GldnRule
The process of human procreation has to have it's "launch event" at some point in the process...I figure, without conception there is never going to be any new life...so that's the logical starting point for me.
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That is alas not so logical as you think as you can say the very same thing about many other things. Without sex there would be no new life for example.
This is before you mention the fact that a vast number of conceptions self abort. More than we know of in fact as many of them happen before the mother even knows there was a pregnancy at all.
At best choosing conception is arbitrary and baseless, at worst it is, as I have pointed out, a meaningless point with regards discussions about "morality", "rights" and things like "right to life".
Unless we can find some way to define why a zygote has rights at all, then there is no basis for arguing that a women... who we CAN argue is an entity with rights.... should not have the right to remove it from her body at will like any other infection or parasite.
The challenge for the anti-choice campaigner on this issue therefore is to make an argument that establishes 1) first that the zygote has rights at all and 2) second that those rights are of a level to usurp or negate that of the mother.
And as I keep pointing out the first step in that challange is to be clear what you mean by your terms when you throw around words like "human" and "life". The definitions you work with have to 1) be such that they include the zygote and 2) be relevant to a discussion on rights and morality.
I have heard no definition yet that does both of these things.
For example you talk about it being a seperate "person entity" from conception. How is it a "person". What definition of "person" are you using here? It is no such thing by ANY definition I have ever heard. It is simply a cell with a piece of DNA in it, DNA which instructs the call on how to make a person out of materials it does not yet have. It is no more than a blue print.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GldnRule
I feel, to be fair and just, we MUST act in accordance with that possibilty...until such time it can be PROVED DEFINITIVELY whether we are killing "a person" or not.
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I disagree entirely because I work from a world view basis of "innocent until proven guilty". Therefore if we can not show we ARE doing harm, I assume we are not.
To operate like you are, I would have to start operating on "Guilty until proven innocent" which is not only something I am not going to do.... but is a completely unworkable world view as you would have to prove that literally everything we do does not cause harm before we allow ourselves to do it. There simply is no way to do this, nor enough time in the world to complete the project.
So no, unless it can be established that we are doing harm, I assume we are not.
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