I mean the first post on the thread - gakroeker’s.
I believe I did reply to it directly, but it’d take me a while to find it.
For the most part, I agree with the argument: most of the pro-choice and pro-life arguments just come down to the determination of whether a fetus is a person.
However, I brought up one argument where this isn’t the case: we generally don’t force people to risk their lives or risk harm. Pregnancy does constitute a risk to the health of the woman… potentially to her life. This is the case even in a normal pregnancy. I gave an example that was argued at length for several pages where I pointed out that if there was a fire in a baby’s room, the law wouldn’t compel the mother to rescue the child, even if the risk to her was minor. Given that the law doesn’t compel the mother to risk her life for the baby after it’s left the womb, I think it would be inconsistent to do this before.
On another forum that I was on it was very easy to not only find all posts that one had written, but also to find all replies to that post. I don’t know how to do that here. And now a lot of what you have stated and asked and what I have stated and asked have been kind of swallowed up in the immensity of postings.
Try clicking on “Display” at the top of the page. A couple of the options have branching diagrams showing the links between messages.
Also, there’s always the “search thread” feature. If you click on “Advanced Search”, you can specify a username and see all the posts from that user.
(I may be new here, but I’m a moderator on another board that uses the same forum software)
I realized this morning that you asked me how my study of biology contributed to what I believe. And I never answered you. I’m sorry about that, especially because I expected you to answer every question that I have put to you. I didn’t do it intentionally, but I did do it.
No worries.
I’ve been thinking about biology and what I learned from it in regards to abortion. This is all only what happened to me. I can’t speak for any other biologists, of course. I think it all started with taking a Histology class. I was pre-med and this was an important class (I was also a smart-mouth and got a “C” in that class but I guess that is off the subject.)
I learned about the parts of the cell and the way they reproduce, and tissues and all that stuff. And I put it all in the back of my head until I took Herpetology, In that class (I got an “A”) I not only learned about reptiles and amphibians but what makes a particular type of animal an animal. What makes a lizard a lizard? Why is a lizard a lizard and not a snake or a frog? Or a mammal? The more I learned the more I realized that what makes a particular animal what it is is that it can reproduce with other members of its species to make a new animal of the same species. But is a fertilized lizard egg a lizard? Yes - it is the essence of the new lizard. It can’t be taken apart anymore and still be a lizard. Once it is reduced to an ovum and a spermatozoan the essence is gone. There are lizard ova and lizard spermatozoa but these separately are reproductive cells of lizards, not lizards in and of themselves.
In a sense, I agree with you: take away the ovum or the sperm, and you won’t have all the component parts for the lizard. However, I’m not sure why what you describe suggests that a fertilized lizard egg is an actual lizard as opposed to, say a lizard “kit” (some assembly required
).
I can think of plenty of situations where I could have all the components of a thing, but they don’t constitute the thing themself until they’re put together in the proper way.
If you take an ovum of many mammals (rabbits, sheep) and pierce it with a tiny little uh thing that pierces, it will develop into an organism. You don’t even need sperm. But this organism has the same genetics as the ovum, so it is questionable as to whether it is a new animal.
Why’s it questionable? You had one rabbit; now you’ve got two. Even if their genes were identical, I’d say that they’re different animals.
And these animals are sick. They die very young. More research is going into this and I think it is a philosophical question, too. Another philosophical question is whether a person is one organism or a collection of millions of organisms working together.
I think this may be a valid question; I also wonder whether a
group of organisms (an ant colony, for instance) couldn’t also be considered an organism itself.
I’m not a philosopher. But remember this is my experience, not scientific data or anything like that. Let’s go back to “essence” and back to humans. I believe that the fertilized egg is the beginning point of the essence of a human being. And the essence is the most basic, fundamental, and simplest way of defining a human being. What makes a human being a human being? Its essence. Is its essence its soul? I don’t believe it is. I used to. But take that fertilized egg and look at it. It has a full complement of chromosomes, different from both the unfertilized egg and the spermatozoan. It has everything it needs to develop along its continuum - zygote, embryo, fetus, infant, child, adult, and it will eventually die. It is the most basic bit of new, separate human being you can have. Of course it will be dependent on others all through its life; first its mother, than probably parents, physicians, etc. Someone once said that death is the only thing we do all by ourselves. I can’t remember who said that. But it may hold some truth.
Whether the human being is inside the mother or inside one of those awful lung machines they used to have is irrelevant. Whether it is a midget or a giant is irrelevant. It has that “essence” from the moment of conception to death.
I take a different view. I think that the fertilized egg has the full
potential to be a human. It develops its “essence” as a human over time.
And that is how biology convinced me that a human being is present at conception. Of course I didn’t come to this conclusion and then stop. I could write a fifty page essay on essence. But this is all I can do now and any more would be extraneous.
I think I see where you’re coming from, and I realize that what you learned as a biologist informed your position, but I really don’t see how the difference between your position and mine is a matter of biology.
