Democratic politician angry that letters on his pro-abortion voting record distributed by private group at local Catholic parishes

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Elf01 said:
Would you have an issue with me saying you are pro appendectomy?
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Yes, I am not ‘pro-appendectomy’. I think they should be legally and safely available to those seeking them on the advice of their doctors. I think preventing them is a good thing because they have risks and use valuable medical resources. So if I am ‘pro-appendectomy’ I am also ‘anti-appendectomy’ or possibly ‘pro-intestinal wholeness’.
 
You don’t believe that because you’re an atheist. However those of us on here who are actually Catholics all know that life begins at conception and that every one who is conceived is a person who has a right to life.
 
FiveLinden said:
What you mean, I think, is that ‘a seperate human being having human rights equal to any born person’ begins at conception.
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Life begins at conception. A separate human life. A human life with dignity given a soul by God. You cannot separate what I said and split it into two pieces. They are one in the same. Stop parsing words to conflate the issue.
 
JoeFreedom said:
Life begins at conception.
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I don’t want to be repetitive but it’s important: both seem and ovum are alive. Life continues through the process from the generation of sperm and ovum, through fertilisation, and on to cell division.

‘Life’ does not mean the same thing as ‘individual human life holding the same rights as a born human being being’. If it did you would have to argue that each sperm was human.
 
No place for this one in the Church… Jesus would be tossing the tables over
 
FiveLinden said:
This is the sort of response that undermines rational dialogue between those with different views on the legalisation of abortion.
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Considering the line you are drawing between comparing an abortion to an appendectomy while rejecting the possibility that you equated a fetus with an appendix, I would agree. Rational dialogue is quite impossible. Situational ethics have allowed some of our greatest evils to flourish. So be pro-abortion, but know that many stand against this as a great evil. We have to least modern situational ethics allow the next Holocaust, or pogram.
 
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pnewton said:
Situational ethics have allowed some of our greatest evils to flourish. So be pro-abortion, but know that many stand against this as a great evil. We have to least modern situational ethics allow the next Holocaust, or pogram
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Given the 623,471 abortions tracked by the CDC in 2016 alone, in the United States, one could argue that the next Holocaust is well underway.
And now, as then, lots of folks are denying the problem, looking the other way or coming up with justifications for its existence.
 
FiveLinden said:
both seem and ovum are alive.
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I am trying to wrap my mind around this horrifying example of the abject failure of education.

If a sperm and ovum join together, they create one living human (who may split into more).

However, if they do not join with a counterpart, they die. They have no way to access anything to continie to exist. They are half-cells, not alive.
 
Annie said:
If a sperm and ovum join together, they create one living human (who may split into more).

However, if they do not join with a counterpart, they die. They have no way to access anything to continie to exist. They are half-cells, not alive.
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But they are alive. You can kill them. We also don’t know how long they can live frozen. Seems to be a a very long time, continuing to exist.
 
They do not grow and are not self-sustaining. They are cells from an actual living oeganism, not organisms in themselves.

And the fact that they do not die off is frozen… I imagine one could do the same with any cells from the body.
 
But they are alive. Life does not begin at conception. If it did there would be a biological act of creation in every conception. As I understand the Catholic belief there is a spiritual act of creation with the creation of a soul. This is not the same concept as ‘life’. I am very clear that I am not a Catholic but I do not think on this point (which is a science issue) there is any Catholic teaching that says sperm and ovum are not alive. As with much ‘pro-life’ rhetoric, this claim (that life begins at conception) is not helpful. Pro-lifers are trying to protect the lives of human beings and their position is that human beings, not life, beings at conception. We need to agree on the things we can agree on, especially the science, in order to have any sort of useful conversation.
 
We do not argue that life in an absolute sense begins at conception, but rather that independent human life begins at conception. It’s just simplified as “life” because in common talk people talk about “life” in that sense.

I think we already had this dicussion once, but a zygote is alive in a much more different way than a sperm or an ovum.

A sperm and an ovum are part of a larger multicellular being. They cannot grow, they cannot develop into something self-sustaining by themselves. They don’t even have a complete genome. They are only alive in the sense that they are a “cell unit” of the larger organism.

A zygote, on the other hand, has a distinct and complete genome, and it can grow, it has the potentiality (totipotency) of developing into an adult human (just like a child) with the right resources, without having to fuse with any other cell. They are no more “parts”, they are a growing independent being.
 
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Freddy said:
If y’all insist on calling people who are pro choice ‘pro abortion’ then you are closing the door to any sensible discussions on how to reduce the number of abortions. As long as you know that.
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That argument also applies in reverse. Anyone who claims that support for abortion amounts to a mere right to choose is likewise being disingenuous with language.

Abortion is the termination of the life of a human being. A proper or sensible discussion of that begins with the admission of what it is exactly.

It isn’t merely a “right to choose.” It is a right to choose to do something very specific - ending the life of a human being.

As long as we all know that then everyone is on the same page.

Why should “right to choose” be the agreed upon start of a discussion? Home field advantage? Right to choose gets to determine the rules? Why exactly?
 
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FiveLinden said:
But they are alive. Life does not begin at conception. If it did there would be a biological act of creation in every conception. As I understand the Catholic belief there is a spiritual act of creation with the creation of a soul. This is not the same concept as ‘life’. I am very clear that I am not a Catholic but I do not think on this point (which is a science issue) there is any Catholic teaching that says sperm and ovum are not alive. As with much ‘pro-life’ rhetoric, this claim (that life begins at conception) is not helpful. Pro-lifers are trying to protect the lives of human beings and their position is that human beings, not life, beings at conception. We need to agree on the things we can agree on, especially the science, in order to have any sort of useful conversation.
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The science agrees that a human life or any other kind of life (of every individual living organism) begins at fertilization, i.e., conception.

We do need to agree on what we need to agree on, especially the science. Ergo, your claim that “Life does not begin at conception,” isn’t a proper starting point. It is you saying “a circle is square because they are both figures” and we should all agree. 😵
 
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FiveLinden said:
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Annie:
If a sperm and ovum join together, they create one living human (who may split into more).

However, if they do not join with a counterpart, they die. They have no way to access anything to continie to exist. They are half-cells, not alive.
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But they are alive. You can kill them. We also don’t know how long they can live frozen. Seems to be a a very long time, continuing to exist.
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The definition of “living” is having…

>Vitality, the essential condition of being alive; the state of existence characterized by such functions as metabolism, growth, reproduction, adaptation, and response to stimuli.

A sperm and ovum only have those conditions for vitality in an attenuated sense and only after they combine. Each is not truly alive, in the sense of having vitality, on its own, although they possess the preconditions for becoming alive.
 
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FiveLinden said:
But they are alive. Life does not begin at conception
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They are alive in the sense that they are not dead cells, but they do not have life in the sense of being autonomous organisms.

Before conception, there exists a large number of sperm and an ovum. If none of the sperm unites with the ovum, then ovum and sperm will “die” in the sense of deterioration due to lack of support from the organism they were a part of.

After conception, there is an entirely new organism, complete in itself. It grows, it takes in nutrition, it has the capacity for reproduction. It has its own DNA, separate from the DNA of either parent.

In short, a life begins at conception.
 
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