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

[vlad321]

Jackson50 said:

Contrary to your meandering rant on Thomas Aquinas, there have been non-religious sources that have said the same thing. I do, however, accept the contentious nature of that issue. I also find it asinine and puerile of you to go off on a fundamentalist rant when I never once mentioned God or the Bible as a reasoning for my stance on abortion. I advocate many policies that are antithetical to the fundamentalists and my own religious beliefs are quite different than those of the fundamentalists. I hope the next time you engage in discourse with someone that you will not make baseless presuppositions.

The point of our conflict is that you and I disagree on what makes a human special and worth more than an animal. You believe it is the actual development of certain traits. I believe what makes us humans unique is our genetic code which allows to develop complex brains capable of abstract thought and et al. That is why I view an embryo or a fetus as inherently human and deserving of the most basic human right...the right to life. Personally, I think a right to life supersedes a right to choose. However, I would allow abortion in certain instances and I may even bend on abortion if it allows for a reasonable consensus between both parties.

 

I hate to break it to you, but even as you are just standing you are losing a countless number of cells with your genetic code, and each cell is dying horribly on your floor, or wherever it falls. Our genetic code is the same as everything else's, we just have the sequence in a different combination of 4 elements than everything else on this blue planet, but it is fundamentally the exact same thing. Humans are animals and there is nothing different between us and the dog next to us. In the grand scheme of nature Lions got claws to tear us apart with and we got brains to make guns to shoot them with, fair tradeoff. Thinking we are something special based purely on material evidence is a folly because we are not. Just because we are able to reason slightly more than other living beings does not make us anything special, it's just our unique trait. A cheetah runs faster than anything else but it still qualifies as as animal, right? Same way with us, we're just animals whose trait is the ability to think. Without the ability to have advanced forms of thought we are no better than the other living creatures on the planet, in fact we are under them because if someone loses the ability of conscious thought they naturally die.

Because of that ill-conceived rant the only way to charactarize a Human as a Human is the conscious thought, because anything without such thought is just simply some other type of biomass. Maybe it can be human with given time, but at its state it is not.

 

I also wanted to comment on another point, that is the one about a fetus being potentially human. I have heard a lot of people that since it had the potential to be human then we are effectively killing the future human. Well that's just a load of bull, just because pregnancy is a much more certain thing than other situations it doesn't make it different. There are many situaations where certain actions will affect others in some way, shape, or form. It just so happens that no one can see how their current actions will affect the future in general. If abortion is illegal because the fetus has the potential to be a full grown human, then hell, so should people be banned from talking to their friends and telling them they shouldn't get pregnant due to one reason or another. They are effectively stopping the potential of a new human being, it just happens to be a little bit further back. Another thing is that a fetus isn't necessarly going to live long enough to be born, even that is not 100% certain. I'm just saying that acting based on potential is just outright stupid and it has no logic, if we start doing that then we should restrict a whole lot of things, everything chains together in one way or another. Remember the Butterfly Effect, and not the movie though that was good too?