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Forums - General - I would like someone to explain to me when "life begins"

superchunk on 10 September 2008
ManusJustus said:

Everything anyone suggests here is an opinion.

My opinion is that life begins when you become self-aware.  For human children, that would be sometime in late pregnancy.  That also applies to living humans, as it is socially acceptable to pull the plug on non-aware humans in vegetative states who have no chance of coming out.

 

That is a great point. However, the one glaring difference is quality of life and potential to never re-awake. A fetus after about the 7th week is much more active than a person in a vegitative state. On top of that the fetus has the full expectation at that point of a long healthy, active life. The only difference is that it is physically unable to say "Hey stop, I don't want to die now!".

Where as a veggie is generally agreed to be without any real chance of living 'normally' and is essentially dead already.

Now, I am not writing this a pro/agains abortion, just answering the question of defining the beginning of life.



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Paul_Warren on 10 September 2008

Well the question asks when life begins not when it ends. And there is just as much debate about when life begins as when it ends. And both science and theology both provide debate on tboth sides of the questions. So, what I was trying to say earlier is that it begins when whatever political party is in charge in a country says that it does. Ie. if the Dems want legalized abortion and they have the stronger political stance and the ability to get the most votes on it then it begins whenever they say that it does. The same when Republicans want to overturn Roe versus Wade if they have the political clout for them to say when it begins. Theologians of different schools say that life begins before conception when spirits enter the body (and I've even heard Satanists say things like this because I was watching a debate between Zeena Lavey and her husband and Bob Larson and the answer she gave indicated that she thought life began before fertilization because she said that she picked her parents before she was even born). And technically speaking without theology in the question...science says that a sperm cell is a living cell and an egg is a living cell, so when they combine to form something greater than both, it must also be a living cell. However, opinions to the contrary exist as everyone knows.



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tarheel91 on 10 September 2008

The problem is that people aren't going to answer honestly. They realize the implications of their answer and make one accordingly. They reverse the proper order. Normally, you come to the conclusion about when life begins and base your views of abortion on that. However, they've already formed their views on abortion and many are going to give an answer that confirms their view.

For everyone saying "live independently of the mother," that's ridiculous. Infants are dependent on their mothers for years. They get sustenance from their mother's breast milk well after they're born. Does that make infants not "alive?"



Tispower1 on 10 September 2008

Fertilalisation, as from that point the 'baby' has a full genetic code, and the potential to be human. That is also the point where it starts growing.



Fei-Hung on 10 September 2008

It's really odd, by law, an unborn baby has no rights! So abortion being branded as murder would be wrong.

But technically, the moment a heartbeat is developed, you are carrying another being and this is imo when life begins. Since logically, it is a heartbeat that determines whether a person is alive or not.



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colonelstubbs on 10 September 2008

Life begins when your are born. You have not experienced anything but goo whilst in the womb.



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akuma587 on 10 September 2008
Tispower1 said:
Fertilalisation, as from that point the 'baby' has a full genetic code, and the potential to be human. That is also the point where it starts growing.

 

Development =/ Life.  The egg and the sperm were already alive.  I can put my cheek cells in a petri dish and culture them, but that doesn't mean they will ever turn into an organism or anything meaningful.

There is no magical transformation from life to non-life, as both of the components of a fertilized egg were alive beforehand.  Thus being "alive" by a human standards would have to be something different.  These are the most plausible theories:

1) When brainwave activity begins (around end of 1st trimester)

2) When the baby becomes self-aware (later in the pregnancy)

3) When the baby can survive outside the womb (depends greatly, but pretty much without exception no fewer than five months)

A baby is definitely already "alive" when it is born, so that theory should be thrown out.



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It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...."  Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson

Jackson50 on 10 September 2008
akuma587 said:
Tispower1 said:
Fertilalisation, as from that point the 'baby' has a full genetic code, and the potential to be human. That is also the point where it starts growing.

 

Development =/ Life.  The egg and the sperm were already alive.  I can put my cheek cells in a petri dish and culture them, but that doesn't mean they will ever turn into an organism or anything meaningful.

There is no magical transformation from life to non-life, as both of the components of a fertilized egg were alive beforehand.  Thus being "alive" by a human standards would have to be something different.  These are the most plausible theories:

1) When brainwave activity begins (around end of 1st trimester)

2) When the baby becomes self-aware (later in the pregnancy)

3) When the baby can survive outside the womb (depends greatly, but pretty much without exception no fewer than five months)

A baby is definitely already "alive" when it is born, so that theory should be thrown out.

I think the difference people make between your own cheek cells in a petri dish and a zygote is that your cheek cells are your genetic code. They are simply cells that contain your life code. A zygote, however, has a completely different genetic code. It has its own 46 unique chromosomes. When conception takes place, you have a genetically unique, newly existing, individual, whole living human being. It may not be developed, but it is still a unique human entity. Is this when life begins? I am not sure. I still, however, believe it is wrong to prohibit that entity from developing.



akuma587 on 10 September 2008
Jackson50 said:

I think the difference people make between your own cheek cells in a petri dish and a zygote is that your cheek cells are your genetic code. They are simply cells that contain your life code. A zygote, however, has a completely different genetic code. It has its own 46 unique chromosomes. When conception takes place, you have a genetically unique, newly existing, individual, whole living human being. It may not be developed, but it is still a unique human entity. Is this when life begins? I am not sure. I still, however, believe it is wrong to prohibit that entity from developing.

I agree that it is a unique organism that did not before exist, but it does not magically start living at fertilization.  I am glad you are using some better vocabulary and actually responding to my claim logically compared to some of these other people.  It is a reasonable ethical debate whether or not we should prohibit that entity from developing into a human being.  And that is not to say that if the baby is aborted that it doesn't lose its life, because it does.

However, this is still different from the "life" question from a sentience standpoint, but we are making some progress.

 



We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.  The only thing that really worried me was the ether.  There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke

It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...."  Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson

ManusJustus on 10 September 2008
appolose said:
ManusJustus said:

Everything anyone suggests here is an opinion.

My opinion is that life begins when you become self-aware.  For human children, that would be sometime in late pregnancy.  That also applies to living humans, as it is socially acceptable to pull the plug on non-aware humans in vegetative states who have no chance of coming out.

 

Perhaps, then, you might modify your definition of life to be whenever something has the potential to be self aware, as you noted that a vegetative state person has no chance of coming out (although some do, don't they?), implying that if they did, we might consider them living.  In that case, the potential could also be applied to the very moment of conception (if not further back), and thus you would need to consider before late pregancy the beginning of life.

The human in a vegetative state was self-aware at one time and is now no longer.  Accepting that a person you once knew will no longer be self-aware is hard to come to grasps with, so them not coming out of it is necessary for that decision to be made.  A young fetus has not become self-aware yet, and similary neither have a sperm or an egg.