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sundin13 on 20 June 2020
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NightlyPoe said:
My qualms over your assertions of "human" and "life" regarding an undeveloped, fertilized egg lie in the fact that these distinctions you are making are functionally useless. If you take a drop of blood and hand it to a scientist and ask "is this alive?" they will look at the cells in the sample and make that determination. I am not asking "if" a fertilized egg is alive, I am asking "how", or "in what sense" is it alive. If the only factor is "the cells are alive", the definition you are providing is far too broad.

We're back to the pimple argument I suppose, but at least it's not as gross.  A drop of blood is not a developing human.  There is no process by which it becomes one.

A zygote or embryo is already a developing human.

Again, you may not like the simple distinction, but the two are in completely different categories.

Similarly, if you then ask "is this human?" they will then look at the DNA inside the cells and make this determination. In both cases, a drop of blood contains all of the same factors of both being "human" and "life" as a fertilized egg. But is a cell belonging to a human a human, or is it the combination of many cells which makes a human?

Again, a drop of blood is not a stage of human development.  A zygote is.

You're looking to erase a distinction that makes all the difference.

Under the assertion that we must inherently protect "human" "life", with such a vague and overreaching definition, that statement stretches far beyond a discussion of abortion. As such, simply leaving it as "it is human life" is fundamentally nonsense.

It's not overreaching at all.  Acknowledging that a zygote is a human and entitled to the protections that come with it really has no impact beyond abortion.

As for the life support question, if that person, say, is undergoing kidney failure and needs a kidney in order to live, we do not mandate that someone gives a kidney to this individual, because the individual has absolute agency over their own body and this agency comes before even the lives of others. Similarly, a woman should have absolute agency over her own body. The state should not mandate she use it in a certain way, just as the state should not mandate individuals give up their kidneys.

It is not agency over herself that becomes the problem.  It is asserting agency over the rights of the child that becomes the problem.  There are competing interests and competing rights.  Furthermore, as I pointed out before, 99% of the time, the woman has already consented to the pregnancy by engaging in sex of her own free will.  So implicit permission to use her body has already been granted.  Further still, it would take an act of violence, not passivity as in the case of the kidney transplant being denied, in order to remove the embryo or fetus (we keep talking about zygotes, but functionally, abortions never happen at that stage).

I do not believe that it's unwarranted to say that the state has an interest in protecting a life over bodily autonomy in this set of circumstances.

We have moved from asserting rights of "humans" to "developing humans". This distinction makes a fairly large difference. It makes it not so much an argument about the present state of the fertilized egg, but instead an argument regarding what that egg has the potential to become. I do not believe the potential of a fertilized egg is inherently worth protecting. There is no relevant difference between this cell and any other cell in its present state. Only in its future can a distinction be made.

But again, the reason I criticized your argument is because it is an argument of inherency. You ascribe an inherent state to the egg as soon as it is fertilized, yet you can provide no basis for why. There is no argument here beyond your beliefs. "It should be this way because it should be this way" is as far as it goes, so there isn't really any discussion to have.

And regarding that last step, first of all, sex is not consent for pregnancy, especially when you have already stated that you provide no exceptions for rape victims. Again, this is a question of agency. A woman can choose to have sex while choosing not to be pregnant. To push pregnancy on her, is to remove a piece of her agency over her own body.

As for the kidney transplant, why is it okay to kill somebody through inaction? But even if you agree that there is a difference, should it be okay for a woman to take a passive approach to pregnancy leading in miscarriage? Successful pregnancy requires a number of active steps to be taken by a woman. It is not a passive process.