Just testing to see if what I was told (that threads close at 1000 posts) is true. I guess it isn’t.
OK my apologies to everyone I answered in haste and said “goodbye” to. I had it on good authority, uh good mistaken authority, that threads stopped at 1000 posts. My authority (who should have known better) was obviously wrong. I’ve gone through forum rules and around them and over and below them and can’t find anything. Therefore I assume this thread is still going strong and I am happy to be back (not that I was gone that long.)
I find it strange that at near to 1000 posts we are back to the beginning. I’m referring to the analogy that was presented in the OP. It’s being kicked around again like an old football that has lost half its air. It doesn’t work. The basic fact is:
**A fertilized ovum is a person. A fertilized ovum is a human being. It may not look like what many consider a human being to look like but that does not mean it is not a human being. It is at the first stage of development. It can’t be compared to tissues in the mother’s body for two reasons:
(1) The mother’s tissue has her DNA and only her DNA. It is not the same DNA as the DNA present in the zygote.
(2) The mother’s tissue cannot develop into other than what it is, e.g. liver cells reproduce to form new liver cells with the same DNA. Liver cells are liver cells. That is all they will ever be. However a fertilized ovum develops over time into an embryo (scientific term used for classification), fetus (scientific term used for classification), born baby, toddler, child, adult. That is unless it dies from natural causes or is ABORTED by surgical and/or chemical means.**
The issue of
morality has been brought up and discussed even though some posters have skewed this topic away by discussions of law and yes, biology. I was unclear on the morality part of the abortion debate when I entered this thread as a poster. I always believed that intentional destruction of what is so obviously a human being is slaughter, no matter what stage that human being is at in her life but I came to this conclusion based upon study of biology and psychology.
Now I am debating on a Catholic forum and here the morality issue can be discussed in ways I was never allowed to use before. If I used the word “murder” someone always came back and said, “That is a legal term. It isn’t murder because it’s a legal term and abortion isn’t illegal so you can’t say it’s murder.” The poster would (most of the time) add a few ad hominum attacks. I have been told to go off and well, you know. I’ve been called stupid, an idiot, a liar, and laughed at in a particularly insulting manner. The "f word " was used a lot although it was never reduced to just the “f.” That is what I was used to and I apologize if I seem defensive at times. A person becomes defensive when she is attacked so rudely so often.
Sorry, a bit off-track there, I can debate morality here and I will. The analogy used in the posts getting up toward post #1000 is weak. It was debunked in the OP. Being put in the position of “having to choose” which life is more important in a hypothetical situation does nothing to devalue the lives that have been lost: the human beings and the persons who have died because they could not be saved. Embryos in a refrigerator are human beings with souls and I have no doubt that if they really existed they would be in heaven. We shouldn’t correlate “personhood” with “age.” If we did that, then would a little boy be considered more or less a person than a middle-aged man?? And we shouldn’t correlate “personhood” with “likelihood of being saved.” Is a soldier at the front less a person than a man sitting in an office at home??
If a child in the womb is not a person what do you say to someone who has undergone fetal surgery and then placed back into the uterus? Was he not a person, then a person, then not a person, then again a person when he was born?? Ask Samuel Armas. He was operated on for spinal bifida at 21 weeks gestational age (“Baby Samuel and mother doing well after fetal surgery,”
World/Net Daily, 2-16-2000.):
"As the surgeon was closing the womb, the miracle happened. Baby Samuel pushed his hand out of the womb and grabbed the surgeon’s finger. Photographer Michael Clancy caught this…on film. And in that instant, Clancy went from being prochoice to being prolife. As he put it, “I was totally in shock for two hours after the surgery…I know abortion is wrong now - it’s absolutely wrong.” (Colson, Chuck, “Life and death decisions: praying for the supremes,”
BreakPoint Commentary #000425, 4-25-2000.)
