I would like someone to explain to me when "life begins"

[Impulsivity]

TheRealMafoo said:

I keep seeing in threads, and on the news, this issue about abortion, and equating it to murder. To be murder, you have to extinguish a life. So first a life must begin.

Can someone, without using the word "God", give me a clear definition of what that means?

My personal definition, is when an unborn child can live on it's own (or be saved with life support). So a 2 month old embryo, is not a life.

How do you define it?

   Ironically (or maybe not ironically if you know the judicial history) you picked the EXACT defination used by Roe v Wade originally.  They set the bar for when abortion was legal at the point of viablility.

    Of course this led to problems that were badly solved in later cases because there's a question as to what viability means.

    For example in the 1970s viability was more or less the last month to 2 months since medical technology was primitive by todays standards.  Now we could keep a 5 or 6 month old baby alive with incubators and medical treatment in scinereos like the untimely death of the mother.  I'm sure in the next 100 years we will have the technology to invent a fully functional artificial womb that the fertilized egg could be placed in immedietly with complete "viability".  Would that mean that morally the acceptable window for abortion depends on science?  Oh the irony!

 

   I would determine the "viable" window in the mothers favor whenever possible.  If she doesn't want the baby and it can't live on its own (no ventilator, no artificial womb) she can choose not to have it.

 

   Alternately I would accept banning abortion.  The caveat is that this ban must be accompanied by a new government program.  This would be the "give unwanted babies to crazy fundamentalists who oppose abortion on purely religious grounds" program.  In it every fundamentalist pro life wingnut who talks about the "choice" of Sarah Palins teenage daughter in the same sentence as they advocate denying such a choice to everyone else must take an unwanted baby for each house they own.  In McCains case he would get not one, not two, but something like a dozen new bundles of unwanted joy to spice up his life.  I'd like to see how long it would be before Bill O'Rileys was out on the street.