Are you Pro-life or Pro-choice?

[Final-Fan]

Crono said:
"Thats like saying that because nobody thinks a fully grown frog is a tadpole and anything in between is impossible to 'prove' that its a frog not a tadpole it must be a fully grown frog since it hatched from its egg. That makes no sense either."

Except we do have names for those stages. When the tail falls off, its a frog.

But I thought we were arguing fetuses here, not amphibians. There are clear beginnings and ends of "Fetus", but the distinction of humanity is much more vague. So the only times we can easily make a distinction is as birth or at conception. You are uncomfortable with this fact because that either makes you a monster for believing its OK to abort a 9 month old fetus, or it makes you wrong on abortion rights because then humanity would begin at conception.

"If an artificial womb existed as an option in medical technology, why would a human using it not be classed as viable whilst one using e.g. a life-support machine would? Viability means the ability to survive outside the mother's womb (dependendly or otherwise [though of course no baby really could survive entirely independently])."

So, what you are saying is, that if a baby is born prematurely, by several months, and would not be able to survive but for the life support that medicine can now provide, isn't viable, and thus, isn't human.

You can't argue viability as a requirement for humanity. If you do, that means plenty of pre-mature babies (who aren't viable except for the medicine we now have) AREN"T HUMAN. I know this isn't the argument you're trying to make, but it is the argument you are making.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

Until you stop trying to shove your black-and-white, all-or-nothing assumption down our throats no progress can be made here.

On another note, yes, the viability argument means that many prematurely born infants are not yet "human" at birth. You act as if this disproves the viability argument. It does not.

(Note that I am not pushing the viability argument myself, but Crono's criticisms of it are just stupid or blind.)

For instance, here's a newsflash on your frog analogy criticism: THE TAIL NEVER FALLS OFF. (At least, that's true for many species.) It gets absorbed/retracted into the tadpole/frog's body in the course of its growth. So when is it no longer a tadpole's tail, but the frog's butt?