>> ^bmacs27:

@Lawdeedaw Really? So this sounds like the words of a guy that values the personal liberties of the mother over a zygote?
"There is something that precedes liberty, and that is life," Paul said. "If we are to defend liberty … you have to understand where that liberty, and where that life comes from. It does not come from the government, it comes from our creator."
Seems to me the "right to life" precedes liberty, and I suspect he would legislate accordingly. Not to mention his introduction of the "sanctity of life act" in 2005 which would have defined life as beginning with conception, and his votes in support of a federal ban on partial birth abortions in 2000 and 2003.
Funny, that sounds an awful lot like every other anti-choice politician's policy making. I didn't realize "choice" was such an infringement on "liberty."


Sigh---even if I am wrong on this issue it doesn't make I dumb btw. Nor would it you.

Paul also doesn't believe in the death penalty--but that's again up to states in his opinion. He doesn't like cocaine but it's not his right to take it from you to decide.

Are his policies sound or sane? No less than the other "candidates." I am not saying he is god nor am I saying that all his policies are golden (I.e., the gold standard.) I would still suspect his policies are better than liars who have no real policies...

Essentially I feel the exact same as Paul in this matter except I don't think life begins in the womb (I feel it begins when intellect starts; i.e., when stimuli can be reacted to.) And, just like Paul, I would never, ever take away a woman's choice on abortions.

Below is a conservative site blasting Paul for his decision to put his personal feelings aside and give choice...

http://www.conservativesnetwork.com/2011/07/12/ron-paul-wrong-on-abortion-its-a-human-right/

If the cavemen-conservatives hate him, I like him.

@Lawdeedaw Really? So this sounds like the words of a guy that values the personal liberties of the mother over a zygote?

"There is something that precedes liberty, and that is life," Paul said. "If we are to defend liberty … you have to understand where that liberty, and where that life comes from. It does not come from the government, it comes from our creator."

Seems to me the "right to life" precedes liberty, and I suspect he would legislate accordingly. Not to mention his introduction of the "sanctity of life act" in 2005 which would have defined life as beginning with conception, and his votes in support of a federal ban on partial birth abortions in 2000 and 2003.

Funny, that sounds an awful lot like every other anti-choice politician's policy making. I didn't realize "choice" was such an infringement on "liberty."

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker: Until you have gone through the process of child-rearing and parenting, then I fear you will have very little capacity to understand what I'm talking about.

We are not discussing child rearing, we are discussing the moral relevance/culpability of human parasites. I understand the rhetorical utility of you pretending that a child and a blastocyst are the same thing, but when you throw in "child-rearing" it betrays the lie of your rhetoric, you can call them "unborn children" if you want, but please stick to the issue at hand.

Your terminology regarding children relegates them to the status of a wart or a tapeworm.

While you seem to have an issue with the WORD parasite, I do not, I understand that I was once a parasite, and since my host wanted me she kept me to term, this causes me no issue or sense of revulsion. Your assertion of innocence and helplessness is built on a mythology which requires that this is not the case, unfortunately for your mythology we know enough about the process that I can easily show what it is.

What's race got to do with it? My caucasian sister & brother in law adopted a half african/american girl and she's a fantastic kid.

Then you should have some idea what race has to do with it.

Healthy black babies (even at half price) get stuck in the system all the time, white babies without serious disabilities do not, you should know that if you are as familiar with trans-racial adoption as you claim.

dicotomy is illogical.

Since you can only spend a dollar once , you have to choose for every cent you handle if, and which, innocents you want to save. Every choice has opportunity cost, claiming it does not is absurd. How many adult human lives is a human zygote life worth? Why choose a new life over the many existing lives which could be saved with resources freed up by its absence?

If people don't want, or don't have the means to care for, potential children, it seems to me significantly more moral to do the responsible thing, and not have them.

~ (zygote-schmawy)

"sanctity of life" needs some deconstruction.

As already mentioned sanctity has problems in being theistic (therefor not amenable to verification), so I'm going to go with value, which exposes one of the fundamental flaws in the question at hand, since value is by it's vary nature subjective, the question needs to be phrased "value of life to you|me|john|The Pope|etc". We have no obvious need to agree, just as with anything value is not transitive, I don't need to base my valuation on yours, and vice versa, you may feel that a bucket of fried chicken is worth $10, while I, being vegan, value it at $0(or less).

The more absurd issue is "life". Before the last millennium humanity seemed to have a pretty solid grasp of what constituted life and none life, people from all over the world could agree on general categories to some extent, their mythology around this was different, but we understood that a lion is not like a rock in some meaningful way.

The problem is that the way we tended to make this distinction , as "life force" is demonstrably wrong, life is not magic, it's chemistry. The knowledge of this fact is extremely new in the course of human history, and we have certainly not integrated this fact into our general cultural context or language, and so part of the problem is that our language, our tool for making and analyzing distinctions, is fundamentally flawed in this regard, and so should be expected to be wrong.

"life" is not a thing or an attribute, it is an arbitrary categorization which we use in an attempt to save our old, cherished, incorrect notion from being discarded.The category life basically comes down to something along the lines of:

"that which we value more than a rock"

Of course this could be "life" in the standard bible-belt sense of "Christian life", or more magnanimously "human life", but neither of these get us a clearer picture. How much "living stuff" which is "human" does it take to get human life? Skin cells, a kidney, a decapitated body on life support, a brain on life support, a group of cell which have the "potential" to become a living breathing adult human? How many "humans" are in a zygote? What if it splits into twins/sextuplets?

And in the end the question is what "should" be the value, so if we put it all back together we get:

What should be the value, to all entities, of an non-clearly defined category of objects of which all the entities seem to be members?

You can tweak the clarifications on that question to make ANY conclusion follow, but their is NO BASIS on which to tweak the clarifications to begin with.

All answers are bound to be meaningless and unsatisfying, because the question is meaningless and unsatisfying.

Societies decide in subtle and organic ways what is valuable and what is unacceptable, and it's a good thing™. I much prefer our current society to euro-diaspora society 100, or even 50 years ago.

*promote for hilariousness. (Holy shit, that's a real word.)

Even though I wasn't convinced by the vagina with no clitoris or clitoral hood. What, are we shaving zygotes now?

this is what happens when the zygote splits but instead of forming one brain for each twin, the cells develop into two identical halves of cherry pie.

>> ^Farhad2000:
Life is sacred is a stupid notion of idealists, life isn't sacred, we wish it was but it isn't.
I can bet right now there is a fire mission danger close to some civilian village, right now there are hundreds of children dying out of malutrition and disease and famine and war. All this is happening while people in the 1st world argue about banning abortion... shit if you care so much adopt all the babies in Africa that are born to slain parents of war and HIV.
The other day AP put out a story that the US would need to donate about 79 billion to help African development to a point where the socities would become self sustained.
Contrast that with the 700 billion dollar bail out plan for the economy, remember that the figure picked was arbitrary when most analysts presume that toxic debt exposure exceeds the trillion mark.
Raised by doctors my view of life is only at birth, you don't count a chick that didn't hatch from its egg as alive do you?


But it's still a chick. You just said so in your own statement. The same thing applies to any stage of human development you choose: it's a human zygote, a human blastocyst, etc. It's human. Whether it is considered a "person" under the law is the debatable point.

And clearly society disagrees with you about life beginning at birth for, as swampgirl pointed out, someone who kills a pregnant woman can be charged in many states with a double-murder.

>> ^SDGundamX:
>> ^jwray:
Life doesn't start at conception, it's a continuous process that started 3 billion years ago. Only sentient life forms have the moral status of persons. A fertilized egg is not sentient.

This is by far the best argument I've heard for the moral grounds for abortion (and also extends to stem cell research). It may be what chilaxe was trying to say but I just couldn't understand the way he was saying it. "Sentient" in animal rights is defined as "capable of suffering" and I'm guessing that's how you're using it here (correct me if I'm wrong). Such a definition neatly sidesteps the issue of consciousness.
So okay, I'll agree with you on this--a zygote and the subsequent stages of celluar development are not sentient for some time--estimates vary from the 13th to the 24th week of pregnancy.
I'm not so sure sentience is a pre-requisite for humanity, though. I pointed out above the case of someone in a coma. chilaxe's counter to that was that we believe "their feelings are there in some manner." But those in a deep coma do not respond to pain and will not remember any pain should they eventually wake up. Hence no suffering. Have they therefore lost their humanity? Are they no longer a person?
The answer to both questions is quite clearly no. I'm interested in understanding "why not," because if only sentient life forms have the moral status of persons then a deeply comatose patient should have lost that status by virtue of being beyond suffering. If the argument is that "well, they may wake up and therefore be sentient again" then I would say you have to include developing fetuses as humans because they too may well be sentient someday--if someone doesn't destroy them first.


The difference is that the person in a coma with the possibility of recovery had some desires in the past that ought to be considered, while the fertilized egg never had any desires.

I would argue that a person with severe brain damage, in a persistent vegetative state, with no hope of ever recovering consciousness (such as Terri Schaivo during her 15 minutes of fame) has lost their personhood. If the brain is dead, then they are, for all moral purposes, practically dead.

@pinky
BWAHAHA... the biggest strawman...
"It is ridiculous to compare an ovum or a sperm to a zygote. Why? Because neither an ovum nor a sperm if left alone in their unique environments will ever develop into a human being, but a zygote will."

Are you kidding? An zygote cannot survive on its own any more than a brain cell can survive sitting on the kitchen table. In fact, a human body can even reject an zygote and it does it all the time.

Here is the problem with this whole issue, you have to pick some point (both legally and logistically) to cell a human as born. We use BIRTHDATE for a reason, it defines the birth of a human. It's when a fetus exits a human body and lives on its own either in the world, or in an NICU.

To extrapolate the nonsense of the slippery slope of legal rights at conception, a woman should be charged with child abuse for drinking or smoking while pregnant. How about taking medications? What about a woman that falls down?

See a woman that gives their child alcohol or subjects them to smoking or throws their baby down the stairs would be in trouble for child abuse. If a zygote is really given the legal status of a baby, then a woman that causes a miscarriage from physical injury should be charges with murder, just like a woman that shakes a baby to death. It isn't an exaggeration, it is following the logical conclusion of those who cling on to some intangible timeline of when life begins.

@billO, what about those unborn babies who grow up to be axe murderers?

What about the unborn baby who will kill the mother? See, you cannot both declare equal weight to an unborn babies life and then say that the mother's life is more important. All life is equal under the law, so all the pregnancies that will be fatal to the mother MUST be allow to continue under this logic. We have to rely on prayer and just let women die (oh and the fetus as well) because life began at conception.

>> ^chilaxe:
"By your logic, a caterpillar and a butterfly are not the same species since one does not contain any of the qualities of the other. Yet biology clearly shows that the DNA of the two are the same. They are the same species. So perhaps you could explain to the intellectual community how, then, a zygote that is a living organism and, like the caterpillar growing into a butterfly, will itself grow into a human being, will have the same DNA as a human being, and yet is somehow not considered a human being?"
I didn't say a zygote isn't a human being, I said it doesn't possess human qualities. Rights exist for reasons, and those reasons are not present in the 50-cell state of a zygote.

I see what you're saying, but you can't get out of this argument so easily. Exactly what qualities make someone human? What, specifically, are these reasons that we have rights? (I feel like Katie asking Sarah to be more specific: http://www.videosift.com/video/Tina-Fey-as-Sarah-Palin-she-does-is-again )

>> ^Crosswords:
^Well to them it's all about the potential, something has started forming that could become a human being. Of course every spermissacred and every egg also have potential, so i guess that means a woman is committing murder every time she has her period (why else so much blood), and a man genocide any time he ejaculates.


It is ridiculous to compare an ovum or a sperm to a zygote. Why? Because neither an ovum nor a sperm if left alone in their unique environments will ever develop into a human being, but a zygote will.

>> ^jwray:
Life doesn't start at conception, it's a continuous process that started 3 billion years ago. Only sentient life forms have the moral status of persons. A fertilized egg is not sentient.


This is by far the best argument I've heard for the moral grounds for abortion (and also extends to stem cell research). It may be what chilaxe was trying to say but I just couldn't understand the way he was saying it. "Sentient" in animal rights is defined as "capable of suffering" and I'm guessing that's how you're using it here (correct me if I'm wrong). Such a definition neatly sidesteps the issue of consciousness.

So okay, I'll agree with you on this--a zygote and the subsequent stages of celluar development are not sentient for some time--estimates vary from the 13th to the 24th week of pregnancy.

I'm not so sure sentience is a pre-requisite for humanity, though. I pointed out above the case of someone in a coma. chilaxe's counter to that was that we believe "their feelings are there in some manner." But those in a deep coma do not respond to pain and will not remember any pain should they eventually wake up. Hence no suffering. Have they therefore lost their humanity? Are they no longer a person?

The answer to both questions is quite clearly no. I'm interested in understanding "why not," because if only sentient life forms have the moral status of persons then a deeply comatose patient should have lost that status by virtue of being beyond suffering. If the argument is that "well, they may wake up and therefore be sentient again" then I would say you have to include developing fetuses as humans because they too may well be sentient someday--if someone doesn't destroy them first.

>> ^Kagenin:
Only a monster would force a woman to carry the child of the man who raped them to term.


Why must pro-lifers and pro-choicers throw superlatives at each other all of the time? A monster! HA! Let's think about this. I appreciate that pro-choicers are making a sincere attempt at what they believe to be compassion by giving women the option to abort. Pro-lifers are making an equally sincere attempt at morality. Palin may be a pitiful excuse for a vice-presidential candidate, (no, let me rephrase that) a disastrous embarrassment to the Republican party, but she's not a monster, and neither am I.

>> ^chilaxe:
>> ^SDGundamX:

Could you enlighten the rest of us as to when life starts since you seem so sure it doesn't begin at conception?

>> ^volumptuous:
Saying that a 50-cell blastocyst that has 0 nerve cells (i.e. 0 feeling) possesses human qualities seems to clearly violate Occam's Razor.
If you have an alternative hypothesis, the modern intellectual community would like to hear it.

I thought SDGundamX's question was a very good one, but in essence your response was, "Let me answer your question with another question." You called for an "alternative hypothesis." Alternative to what, exactly? None of you pro-choicers (with the very dubious exception of Spoco) have offered an explanation of when life begins.

Then let me offer my opinion on the subject. Philosophically speaking, if you believe in human life as a concept in and of itself, there MUST be a SET point at which a fertilized egg ceases to be "life" and is suddenly given the sacred status of "human life." It is not philosophically sound to argue that human life begins at some point between 24 and 26 weeks of pregnancy. Human life is not defined by dependency on environment nor on physical or mental capabilities. (A human infant holds the sacred title of "human life," but it has less intellectual capacity and is less capable of independent survival than a border collie.) Infants and fetuses are just as dependent on their environment as zygotes. They are simply in a later stage of human development. A human being cannot be instantly endowed with all of the capabilities of an adult, and there must be a starting point. I'm really sorry that the ovum doesn't instantly take on a little miniature human form when it is fertilized. Then maybe people would think of it as a thing with all of the necessary equipment for becoming an adult human being?

Where is the logic of those who believe in 13-week abortions but not 22-week abortions? I see no difference but time. If you take a child out of the mother at 22 weeks, it cannot survive on it's own. It's gonna need a heck of a lot of help. Ah, but it is human life, is it not? It is no longer all wet and icky and attached to an umbilical cord and TAH DAH! it isn't dead! LIFE! Oh, goody. Now we know when human life begins.

"By your logic, a caterpillar and a butterfly are not the same species since one does not contain any of the qualities of the other. Yet biology clearly shows that the DNA of the two are the same. They are the same species. So perhaps you could explain to the intellectual community how, then, a zygote that is a living organism and, like the caterpillar growing into a butterfly, will itself grow into a human being, will have the same DNA as a human being, and yet is somehow not considered a human being?"


I didn't say a zygote isn't a human being, I said it doesn't possess human qualities. Rights exist for reasons, and those reasons are not present in the 50-cell state of a zygote.