There deserves to be a special place in hell for smug, smarmy “pro-lifers”.
Dear @pzmyers I’ve read some of your reactions to pro-life claims on embryology. You seem to confuse biological claims with philosophical ones sir.
Oh, please, don’t “dear” and “sir” me. Have you ever noticed how some people like to paper over their stupidity with the most superficial expressions of politeness, as if it makes their argument respectable? Give me blunt honesty any day.
I also don’t need random goons on the internet telling me I have to make some distinction between science (usually, in this context, preceded by an unvoiced “mere”) and philosophy. Biology is a subset of philosophy. I get enough of that crap from real scientists.
Also, you don’t get to dignify your religious prejudices with the label “philosophy”.
Also, while it is try that there is always life somewhere and it always comes from the continued process of “previous” life so to speak, you are missing the point when you state this. The human you and I are do have a very distinguishable start and finish: fertilization and death.
Stop right there. That’s the whole point of contention, that you want to claim human life is distinguished by a bright sharp dividing line at the beginning and end. You don’t get to simply assert it. You especially don’t get to claim that I am missing the point when you blithely gloss over the whole argument by fiat.
You don’t even have an argument. You’ve got a preconceived emotional assumption that you’ve reduced to a simple binary state, and you are so damned ignorant that rather than consider the complexity, you’re going to parrot premises at me and refuse to think. Thinking makes the process complicated. You can’t deal with complexity. And most importantly, you don’t want complexity.
You and your “fertilization”. When in fertilization? Binding of sperm and egg recognition proteins? Membrane fusion? Fusion of the pronuclei? Be specific about that bright sharp line. Explain to me precisely why the cell before that instant is not human, and after it is.
(I can even guess what line of cant you’ll recite at me — some nonsense about a unique combination of genes. Because all we are is a particular matrix of genes, and it’s not as if gametes would have their own unique set of alleles. Fucking clueless idjit.)
I’m not even going to try and deal with your simplistic absolutist notions about the simplicity of death. You want to sanctify the sacred identity of a single cell at birth, and then at death let’s just ignore the trillions of human cells fading away piecemeal and pretend humanity is an aggregate property that winks out instantly when the heart stops or brain waves are undetectable or some such arbitrary criterion. You can’t even be consistent.
Fertilization starts the process of a distinguishable unique human being, ever so small, and death marks the absolute ending of that same unique inidivual.
Repeating the same assertion twice doesn’t make it true. Repeating the same assertion twice doesn’t make it true.
The only thing I can agree with in your dogma is the phrase “starts a process”. Making a human being is a process. It’s not a switch. It’s not a beginning state and an ending state, with no ambiguity in between. You want to compress into nothing all the wonderful complexity of development, and reduce it to “is a baby”/”is not a baby”.
I’m going to throw one of my favorite quotes from Aristotle at you — not because he’s an authority you must obey, but because it’s a remarkably lucid statement of the obvious.
Why not admit straight away that the semen…is such that out of it blood and flesh can be formed, instead of maintaining that semen is both blood and flesh?
He’s pointing out that the beginning is not the whole of the story. That the gamete/zygote is not a complete organism at the onset, but must undergo a long pattern of epigenetic differentiation to build the tissues and organs and even identity of the adult. Even 2300 years ago it was patently obvious to philosopher/scientists that your magic dividing line was bullshit.
Wait, I know what’s coming next — no pseudo-profundity from a forced-birth activist is complete without some quote from an academic authority who favors their position, because as we all know, no one with a Ph.D. is biased.
Furthermore would you mind reviewing a quote by C. Ward Kisscher of the University of Arizona College of Medicine who is a specialist in human embryology? It reads:
“Every Human Embryology textbook, and every human embryologist, not only identifies the continuum of human life, but describes it in detail; which is to say: At any point in time, during the continuum of life, there exists a whole, integrated human being.”
Fuck, that doesn’t even make sense. The first part states that there is a continuum of development, and then the second part denies that and simply declares every point in development to be a whole, integrated human being.
A blastocyst is a whole, integrated goddamn blastocyst, it isn’t a person.
But hey, if you’re going to just cockily name-drop and expect us to accept your assertions because some old guy with a doctorate in developmental biology said so, you’re just going to have to believe this old guy with a doctorate in developmental biology. Or instead you could look at the biology and the evidence.
I suspect you aren’t intellectually equipped to do that, though.
I just want to clarify. Are we absolutely sure this isn’t someone who just confused their sex ed tapes with the first act of Inner Space?
No argument here, except I wouldn’t assume that “C. Ward Kisscher” said what he’s quoted as saying, said it in the context implied by the quotation or, frankly, that he even exists without doing a thorough check.
Oh for…What a wealth of shit is contained in those 17 words pretending to say something profound. Lifers do love their deepities, and never show the slightest sign of actually thinking about them.
I wasn’t a whole, integrated human being for the majority of my life. I’m still not, but I’ve made my peace more or less. Now, if my mother hadn’t been afraid of dying of a back alley abortion, things would have been different. Sure, I wouldn’t have had the chance to be a whole, integrated human being, but I can testify that it’s no fucking fun living a life where that chance is deliberately pulverized.
Many years ago I spent a happy afternoon on a now defunct forum dedicated to a now discontinued LotR RPG. One guy argued with the support team that the Balrog was too weak and easily killed without its magic.
So one of the support team agreed to play a fight against his advanced level character. Since the claim hinged on the magic abilities, they agreed not to use magic.
The “hero” gets the first action. Guy writes “My character shouts out “I am Blablabla blablabla and so on and so on yadda yadda”, using this magical ability to invoke fear and lower my opponent’s attacks by X
Thank you for reminding me of that time. It was great (I was still using a 30 hours a months contract and had to stay off the internet for the next week, but it was worth it)
csrster:
That took about 5 fucking seconds. Read your heart out:
And so on.
If a fertilized egg is a fully human being, God has to take the blame for all the egg-humans that fail to implant, and all the implanted humans that spontaneously abort. He really doesn’t seem to have any problems with abortion, looked at that way.
Nor does God have any problems with abortion, looking at the scriptures. The current hype over abortion is a political movement to energize conservatives, and to distract from their abysmal past stand on civil rights and current failings in social justice.
As for the e-mail, I have trouble with any written message that contains so many typos and such poor writing, coming from a person whose stance is supposedly based on a careful and exact reading of literature.
PZ, I love your point about the equivalence of the quoted authorities. And all the rest of this post.
But don’t you understand that the organelles in the blastocyst or whatever contains divine nanotech housing the software that makes up the unique soul? (at least for men). Also, the bloodstream contains thingies that transmit “the Force”, explaining how Luke Skywalker could do his stuff.
— — — —
Going off on the subject of confusing things, I find it hard to imagine a Bible version translated into something “nice”. An anthology of religious commands and parables -many of them contradictory- is not a philosophy.
“A ‘queer Bible’? Better to re-interpret The Word through a new lens” http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/18/queer-bible-kickstarter-campaign-christianity
By the way, if you are a hindu, how does the soul get into that growing fetus? I can imagine a new soul in a new fetus, but an old soul? Is it something involving quantum?
I’m not a scientist, but I find the idea that cell, or embryo, or fetus is as much of a person as a person batshit crazy. Does an embryo at the 3 week stage have plans for its future? Hopes? Family to consider? etc…..
But I usually argue along the lines of Judith Jarvis Thompson. For arguments sake, let’s say a blastocyst is a human, you still have to accept a woman’s right to abortion. You can’t force another person to be hooked up to a sick person, even if that is the sick person’s only way of living, and if a person were to agree to be hooked up, but change their mind, you can’t keep that person hooked up, even if it means the death of the sick person….Mutatis mutantdi, if a woman is a person, you can’t force her to carry a person, let alone something that has only potential to be a person.
To one and all that proclaim that the products of conception are a human, I will present for their perusal, a blastocyst and they must immediately tell me what color its eyes are, if it’s male or female and they must use the same non-scientific testing that their thoughts are.
Since a group of human cells are a human, should I decline having part of my thyroid removed, due to hyperthyroidism and it is compressing my trachea?
Should we swaddle a human cancer tumor after surgical removal?
If a woman presents advanced toxemia as she enters her mid-second trimester, we’ll preserve the fetus and let her die, even though she’ll not survive to birth that fetus?
Should we permit a woman to die from an ectopic pregnancy, gotta preserve that embryo at all costs, yes?
I’ll warn, two of the questions above are part of my personal history and while I’ve tolerated a fool badly in the past, in these, I’ll be intolerable.
All of this is, of course, rendered pointless by the fact that no living human has the right to use yours or my or any pro-life person’s internal organs to support his or her own life. This email writer is not a murderer for every person who died waiting for blood or a kidney that he could have donated.
wzrd1 @ 10:
A Catholic hospital would answer yes to both of those. The second case has happened more than once.
@jambonpomplemouse 11, that’s essentially a restatement of what Jarvis Thompson argues.
PZ:
I don’t think it’s “stupidity” per se: it’s willful ignorance, an unwillingness to think clearly and carefully, coupled with a cavernous lack of empathy (for women, who are as usual completely absent from any consideration by Forced Birthers), under superficial cover of politeness to hide the monstrosity of their views and the horrendous consequences those views have in the real world. IOW, its conservatism.
Menyambal 6:
Quite.
Obviously god loooooves abortions, and wants us to have a lot more of them in order to worship him properly.
But not to worry! With the exciting advancements in uterus transplants, we can all just send our used tampons to d00ds like the emailer so they can implant and then carry to term these “unique human beings” themselves. WIN-WIN.
Brian E 9 and jambonpomplemouse 11: I think you might like visiting my Abattoir.
Caine @12, my point precisely. While I was away on military training, my wife was diagnosed with an ectopic pregnancy that was entering the second trimester. Needless to say, that is a medical emergency.
Alas, the military health care of the time, CHAMPUS, would only cover the closest hospital, which was a Roman Catholic hospital.
The hospital demanded my permission to perform the abortion and I was quite distant and extremely difficult to locate, due to the nature of the training.
The Red Cross worker didn’t believe my wife’s “story” and didn’t forward the emergency. That worker was asked to find new employment when her management learned of the failure to notify a service member of a major family emergency – after I was finally made aware of the situation.
Fortunately, the training was within the US and my local commander bent a dozen regulations to get me back home, which took three days.
Fortune was with us, as her treating physician went ahead with the abortion, against hospital policy, which resulted in his being terminated for cause.
As my wife is not Catholic, it became an instance of the hospital forcing a non-Catholic into their religious beliefs against any imaginable standard of medical care and a telephone to another old Army buddy held up all federal funding for that organization.
Needless to say, facing insolvency, the hospital changed its policy for non-Catholics.
And yes, my thyroid is the size of Cleveland (OK, it just feels that way), my endocrinologist prescribed a medication that will hopefully bring things under control. I’ll take her word and experience for it, my medical experience involved dealing with human plumbing and plumbed glands, dealing with plumbing only going near, that’s outside of my experience and training. ;)
I have, several times, ask “pro-life” people who were arguing with me on the internet to come up with a definition of “living human being” that was:
1. Based on biology, not simply your prejudices about what ought to be true,
2. Includes all human embryos from fertilization on (subproblem: define “fertilization” which, as PZ pointed out, is not a single event)
3. Either excludes brain dead people OR deals with end of life in some other way (i.e. if you want to call the person alive until every last cell dies or pretend that the heart stopping is death or whatever, go for it, but you’ll have to justify that too)
4. Does not count identical twins as a single person (or explains why they should be considered a single person)
5. Does not count chimeras as two people (or explains why they should be considered two people)
6. Excludes cancers, unfertilized gametes, and nucleated somatic cells (or, again, explains why they should be considered people)
No one came up with a coherent definition, though I did get one person saying that asking the question proved I was evil. I didn’t understand that one either.
So many posts, comments, and emails of this sort are marked by strange affectations.
I imagine a small British child breathlessly entering his mother’s home office – “I climbed under the old garden gate and met some magical fairies, mummy! They were ever so small…”
I suspect the excessive formality, tweeness, and so on serve some psychological function for the writers.
I’m intrigued by the arguments of Brian E@9 and jambonpomplemouse@11. It’d be great if someone with greater writing skills than I put together a short story with the following premise:
– Medical science comes up with an innovative cure for a nasty degenerative disease. It involves finding a donor with a compatible blood type, and deeply interconnecting the blood systems of the donor and the sick person for a minimum of 9 months. If this is done, the disease is cured and the sick person won’t die (of that disease). If the connection is broken before the required time the degenerative disease returns, much worse than before. Because of this, only one donor can be used.
– The protagonist is walking down the street one night, and is attacked. When he wakes up, he strapped down in a hospital bed, connected to a person in the next bed by multiple tubes carrying blood.
– When the protagonist demands to be let go, he is informed that since he is already connected he must stay connected. He challenges this in court through his lawyer, but loses. He is legally compelled to stay connected until the cure is complete.
I wonder how many pro-lifers would shut up and stay connected if put in that situation?
I’ll concede that that’s a “major event” in the development of a new person, a necessary and important step.
Uhm, that’s not actually the way it is usually defined, though it is sometimes defined that way. Most often implantation is cited as the beginning of a pregnancy for several reasons:
First: the huge rate at which fertilised eggs fail to implant with nobody being the wiser that this merging of egg and sperm even happened.
Second: “pregnant” and “pregnancy” are usually words related to the person with the uterus. “I am pregnant” is the statement of the pregnant person, not that of the embryo.
Using fertilisation as the starting point is therefore often a red flag in those discussions: the person using that definition not only wants to gloss over the implantation problem but also wants to vanish the person who is pregnant from the discussion. Which leads me to the next point:
If it’s not part of the pregnant person* it doesn’t have to use that person’s heart,liver, kidneys, lungs etc for survival. If it’s not part of the pregnant person it can just get the fuck out, right?
I loathe that “mother” language. A pregnant person may already be a mother because she already has children, but being pregnant doesn’t make you a mother any more than having an egg makes you a chicken farmer. It’s again a way language is used to emotionally manipulate people , trying to establish a very intimate relationship before the fact. Fact is, many pregnant people don’t become mothers. Some pregnant people aren’t women to start with. Many pregnant people suffer miscarriages. Some people put up a baby for adoption. In short: Mother is a job description, not a state of being accomplished by ever having a fetus grow inside you.
@19: Don’t forget that the donor has about a 1 in 10,000 chance of dying from the procedure and he is practically guaranteed to have some physical change to his body from it. Not to mention that he will experience a number of inconveniences and side effects, some reversible, others not, during the procedure itself.
But there is no need to go science fiction on the issue. The situation already exists. It’s called bone marrow (hematopoietic stem cell) donation. In order to become a potential donor, you must, voluntarily, provide tissue for cell typing. It is relatively rare for a match to occur (I’ve been in the registry for several decades with no hits) so if you are a match, you’re probably THE match. Bone marrow transplants are only performed for life threatening illnesses because they themselves are life threatening. The risk to the donor is an order of magnitude less than the risk of completing pregnancy. Side effects are rare. And yet, when it comes down to it, a person who has agreed to be a donor can not be forced to go through with the donation if they change their mind. There has been at least one case and it was decided in favor of the no longer willing donor. That legal precedent should make abortion legal from conception to birth, if there were any consistency at all in the law.
So here’s another semi-sci fi scenario that is probably possible: Ectopic pregnancies, where the blastulocyst implants somewhere other than the uterus, exist. Most are nonviable, but implantation on the intestinal lining can result in a baby being born (by c-section, obviously). Men have intestinal lining. There are “snowflake babies”, aka fertilized eggs, frozen in fertility clinics all over the world. These blastulocysts are in danger: liquid nitrogen isn’t perfect suspension and they become less viable over time.
Now, then, where are the “pro-life” men who should be volunteering to carry said “babies” to term on their intestinal lining? I’ve offered to arrange the clinical trial several times when talking to “pro-life” men and got…nothing. No enthusiasm at all. You’d think they’d be practically demanding this procedure, but no…
@PZ – Nice reply, but I suspect the dear sender is not interested in even reading it.
See, I just like the simple “If my child needs a kidney transplant, I’m the only viable donor, and the child will surely die unless I give them one of my kidneys, can I be legally forced to give up one of my kidneys?”
“I suspect you aren’t intellectually equipped to do that, though.”
Dr, Meyers, please-some decorum if you don’t mind.
This “person” may very well be intellectually equipped to comprehend all the subtle differences, and the unsubtle differences for that matter, but this comprehension hardly assists their backwards black/white view of the subject, so such comprehension will not be even attempted, let alone be used to inform an opinion.
I suspect you are confusing stupidity with malice. This person may not be stupid, just incredibly cruel.
PZ, I worry about your blood pressure and emotional well-being when these things come up, but damn, you’re eloquent when you’re righteously angry.
Dear Dr. Myers,
While you are undoubtedly an expert in biology, you may be less familiar with philosophy. As such, sir, I must humbly ask you to please consider my hypothesis that humans are, in fact, balloons. Like balloons, humans start small, then become large, then sometimes become slightly smaller at a much slower rate. Thank you for your consideration, sir.
Politely yours,
C. Rank
mykroft 19: that story, in the form of a famous thought experiment, has been around at least since 1971. See Judith Jarvis Thomson’s, “A Defense of Abortion” Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall 1971) (referenced by Brian E at 9).
See also my Abattoir. :D
dianne 22: I love the way you think.
@12 & 20
Thank you. I’m so fucking sick of the “personhood” debate, because even if the anti-choice folks were 100% unambiguously correct in that fertilization is the moment you become a person, it’s still entirely beside the point. No person, regardless of familial relationship, has the right to another person’s body. End of line.
After reading my last article [Have They Never Heard Of Human Embryology?] he asked me: “Why don’t these people cite Human Embryology when they write about life issues?”. My reply: “Because if they did, the game is over”
Or perhaps they don’t cite Kischer’s interpretation of human embryology because it appears that very few in his field agree with him, such as, for example, when no one wanted to publish one of his articles until he sent his work to a Catholic journal that mixes “science and spirituality”.
I sometimes think the only reason people say life begins at conception is so they don’t have to admit a woman who has a child out of wedlock saved that baby from dying as an ovum.
mykroft @ 19 – this wouldn’t be possible because there are existing laws prohibiting hospitals from taking tissue or blood from one person and giving it to another without the patient’s consent. People die every day in hospitals from injuries and leave behind healthy organs in the process that can’t be taken if the person hasn’t signed a donor card. The hospital would need your protagonist’s permission (or that of a health care proxy or designated representative) to give the blood to another person even if the other patient was on the point of death.
Because the current federal law for everything but abortion holds that bodily autonomy is inviolable. The government cannot use your body or force you to use your body for something you don’t consent to, even if a life is at stake. Unless you’re a pregnant woman.
Miscarriage is Gawd’s way of aborting the evil scum before they become adults and other people latch onto them. So it is a mistake to accuse Gawd of killing babies like people do. People are trying to kill the babies that Gawd already decided will be good.
[ … how did Hister grow to adulthood and got a whole country to kill 6 million people????…. ugh ugh ugh]
drst @ 32: Yep. Dead people have more rights than pregnant people.
Why the specification? “Human” embryology is pretty similar to embryology of other animals.
Then why is this shit so derivative?
Reginald Selkirk @ 35
“Human” embryology —
Some bees and ants have haploid adult males that come from unfertilized eggs. Almost as if eggs/ova are living members of their species.
Has anyone really thought about how easy fertilization is? Implantation is fairly difficult, development is difficult, but fertilization? We could do that in a test tube in the 20th century. It’s easy! So why should a sperm, which is just one very easy step from being ***A BABY!!!!*** be killed at will. Death penalty for (male) masturbation because think of all the poor, innocent sperm that are dying without even the chance of meeting an egg. And wet dreams, well, they’ll revitalize the prison industry as all those involuntary homicides get prosecuted…
What? It’s no sillier than a fertilized egg being a baby.
Giliell:
*Fistbump* I’m with you in loathing the constant refrain of “mother” language. It’s a highly convenient way to erase women altogether, by placing them on this distant pedestal of an old ideal. No room for actual human beings up there.
I have blueprints and a brick. I am a homeowner!
Personally, I’d like to meet an embryologist who isn’t a human…
Brian E. @9
QFT. I just wanted to quote the whole thing because all the O Holy Foetus crap and the whenisitaperson argument don’t amount to a moral justification for forcing a person to let their body be used against their will.
I guess I understand the SIWOTI syndrome, and actually I don’t think it’s right to say a blastocyst is a person. So have an abstract argument about the biological/psychological/whatever criteria for being a person if you want. Some other time, maybe.
But that’s definitely not where we should be bearing down, because this is a moral argument in which personhood is supposed to carry some kind of weight, enough to get you to a conclusion that abortions are wrong. You don’t have to demonstrate that particular premise is false, in order to show the conclusion doesn’t follow.
We ought to be loudly asserting “Fuck yes, sure, a blastocyst is a person. Obviously it is. So what?” Or at most we should be indifferent to the that kind of claim in this context. The question is still why that is supposed to matter, why it’s supposed to lead to the conclusion the anti-abortion side wants. Their argument still doesn’t work.
I’m a person, a pregnant woman’s a person, Donald Trump’s a person, Adolf Hilter was a person, and on and on. There’s lot of fucking people, so let’s add a ton of blasocysts into the mix too. Why not?
It remains the case that none of those people — however many of them there are and whatever can coherently be said to qualify them as such — not one of them can legitimately be forced to relinquish their bodily autonomy. Forcing a pregnant women to carry the fetus is not the right thing to do, not if the thing on the other end is a person or a blastocyst or a fucking rock. It could be whatever the fuck it happens to be, and we shouldn’t be taking away that right from the pregnant woman or from anybody else. That’s the only point that needs to be made. It’s not a hard one to understand either, if it’s made clearly and unequivocally. And you can argue about arcane biological details some other time, because it’s simply not relevant here.
I wonder how many pro-lifers think organ donation should be mandatory. If their genuine concern is with saving lives, and they think it’s acceptable to sacrifice bodily autonomy for that end, then this is a more sensible starting point.
The problem, of course, is that this policy wouldn’t do anything to control sexuality.
Shame the religious wackheads seem to rely on one line in the bible to protect them “…suffer fools gladly..” to protect them for the wrath of PZ
Obviously god loooooves abortions, and wants us to have a lot more of them in order to worship him properly.
Actually, what god really likes is black holes. All this other crap is just a byproduct of his black hole collection.
I’ve asked a few “it’s important to determine when an embryo becomes a person so we can ban abortions after that” men if they think that fathers should be legally required to donate their blood to save their newborn’s life.
Their answer, “NO! Because bodily autonomy is a basic human right and that could create a slippery slope.”
My question, “So only pregnant persons should not have bodily autonomy?”
Incoherent answer…
Typical sophistry that ignores the woman totally. Which makes it meaningless, and utterly dismissable.
Any rational statement on abortion start out the presupposition that women are full human beings with all the rights of men, including the right of bodily autonomy. And anything to do with the gamete/zygote/fetus must always recognize the concept the women are full human beings with those rights.
If women are to lose their rights, then evidence is required to show the gamete/zygote/fetus is considered more of a human being than the women (who are the equal to men) with solid evidence. A “temporary inconvenience” is just so much bullshit, as it it is a lifetime commitment.
What idjits.
Consciousness Razor @42
That’s exactly the right argument. Nothing to do with science or biology, it’s moral philosophy all the way down.
Is Henrietta Lacks still alive?
hmm… Kisscher is supposedly:
that set bells ringing.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Bioethics_Advisory_Commission
Kisscher is to developmental biology what Bill Donohue is to Catholicism.
namely, a barking chihuahua.
Oh come on, you’re not even trying!
Python already addressed this decades ago :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUspLVStPbk
Comes from authoritarian parents mistaking obedience for respect.
MRAs are horrified by the thought of paying child support. Most think it unjustly awarded. Many are convinced that women are trying to trap men into paying child support. Some dispose of their masturbatory emissions most carefully, so that women cannot break in, steal the stuff, use it to get pregnant, and thereby force a man into a lifetime of child support and unwanted parenthood.
I don’t know the overlap between MRAs and forced-birthers, but it seems a double standard, there. Kind of like the idea that if two strangers have sex, all the consequences drop on the woman.
As PZ observed, the fallacy is that at some point after first contact of egg and sperm there exists an instant at which a unique human comes into being and that at some other instant that unique human ceases to exist. The pro-lifers miss that the whole of life is a set of processes.
What is being claimed is like old pulp science fiction stories, if you need genius X to find the McGuffin and the Big Bad has killed genius X then clone X to find the McGuffin. Even brief examination of that idea shows how wrong it is; a unique being is the product of a myriad of chaotic interactions, biochemical, environmental, psychological and social.
Menyambal @ 6:
Not only that but according to the doctrine of original sin held by most mainstream Christian denominations, all those precious little baby-souls are going straight to Hell. The Catholics at least tried to dodge this issue by inventing the concept of “Limbo” but had to drop it for lack of scriptural foundation…
Very much so. The Ancient Romans were in the habit of exposing infants (particularly female infants) and while this was made a capital offence in Christian times, it appears not to have been enforced. Because, you know, what’s a few dead babies between friends when you’re trying to establish your foothold as the state religion?
I hate to come across as one of those atheists but trying to avoid doing so when Christians attempt to argue from a presumed moral high ground is tough…
[quote]Fertilization starts the process of a distinguishable unique human being, ever so small, and death marks the absolute ending of that same unique inidivual.[/quote]
This is also an interesting conflation. It’s quite the bald assertion that ‘unique human being’ and ‘unique individual’ are the same thing. A body with it’s brain obliterated by some process, and only alive via modern technology is not an individual even if it is a unique human. Being an individual requires a mental component that neither a fetus, nor a vegetable possess.
MRAs are horrified by the thought of paying child support. Most think it unjustly awarded.
Vasectomies are cheap. compared to having to worry about child support.
Caine
Oh, and there’s the other aspect as well: Mothers killing their children, something generally considered to be amongst the most horrible crimes out there. Terminating an embryo at 6 weeks suddenly puts you on the same level as Medea*, La Llorona and Gretchen from Faust….
*Have you ever noticed how Iason never gets any responsibility laid at his feet? He left them, not caring if they live or die, but it’s only Medea who gets the blame…
Giliell @ 58:
Oh yes, I’ve noticed. I’ve long disliked the story of Jason and Medea for that reason – she’s made out to be one of the most evil b!tches ever, and it’s as if poor, poor Jason barely has anything to do with it all, that Medea, she’s pure evil. The roots of misogyny are so damn deep, that most people don’t even realize this internal bias they are walking around with and informing their opinions and actions.
Intaglio @54,
I find most clone stories in sci-fi and comics to be disappointing, because they usually skip over a lot of the interesting (to me) aspects and implications, often for the purposes of accomplishing a pretty standard plot development, like explaining how the villain “survived” his or her apparent death, or giving us a “hero fights his or her evil opposite” scene.
I usually find myself saying, “ok, I can sort of accept that you managed to clone a human being successfully. But you also managed to accelerate the development process of a human so that your one-year-old clone is indistinguishable from the adult original, AND you’ve mastered the technology of copying memories and knowledge from one human brain into another…. and instead of marketing that technology to billionaires craving immortality, you’re just using it as a step in your garden variety criminal schemes?”
With the notable exception of Orphan Black, though I’m only one season in.
This thread is full of interesting comments, yet I feel it lacks something. But what… Oh, of course. So far no parachuting “pro-lifers” explaining how sacred single celled organisms are and how they love women and babies. Huh. Wonder where they all went.