Reasons not to consider the foetus human life

[markeverett49]

I am not talking about whether abortion is a sin, or whether it should be legal. I am talking about whether it is murder. Aquinas had the same line that I outlined in this thread.

No. You are wrong. Aquinas was not sure how soon the fetus became a human being. (He didn’t know what we do about biology.) We are not in doubt about that. From conception, a new human being is present. Aquinas opposed the killing of innocent human beings. You know the fetus is a human being but want to say it is okay to abort one so you appeal to the principle that SOMETIMES it is okay to kill a person—such as when convicted of a capital crime, or when at war, or when using self-defense to repel a deadly attacker—but none of these apply to a fetus, so you come up with the novel standard of ‘less than six weeks old.’ Appealing to Aquinas won’t help you here. He only thought it might not be homicide because the fetus might not be a human being right away, but we now know that a fetus is always a human being and never anything ELSE or anything LESS than a human being. It is homicide in ANY case. You just think it is justifiable because the fetus is young, not because the fetus isn’t a human being.

 

[Robert_Caritas]

** Edit **: I hadn’t seen the 7th page – so I’m a little out of step But everything still applies.

This is irrelevant; cancer cells have 46 chromosomes, teratomas have 46 chromosomes, ectopic pregnancies have 46 chromosomes. If you’re going to count chromosomes to define a human, that’s a lot of nonhumans with Down syndrome we have around here.

I Filippo Bruno, I strongly feel that you’re not letting yourself look at the whole picture here. The fertilized egg is a fusion of reproductive cells which will go on to multiply itself of its own accord, to form a human being. This is totally unique for any human cell.

You are focusing on other cells that have one of these characteristics (maybe 46 chromosomes, multiplication, etc). But none have all of them and results into a human being.

Also (I've read most of the thread), your characteristic of neurological activity as marker of being allowed to kill is flawed. No matter what argument you present (pain or other), it is just as arbitrary as any other criteria (heartbeat, birth, movement, etc). 
You also ignored my previous post when I made a similar argument. If you disagree with how I'm stating this, please give a response, and I will clarify things (or change my mind, who knows).

Just in case you need this, here is against the utilitarian “pain” argument: Murdering someone painlessly and murdering someone painfully are pretty much identical moral equivalents (think of knocking someone out and stabbing them, versus simply stabbing them). The result is the termination of that persons future on this earth. Life and potential are taken – that is murder.

 

[Filippo_Bruno]

Also (I've read most of the thread), your characteristic of neurological activity as marker of being allowed to kill is flawed. No matter what argument you present (pain or other), it is just as arbitrary as any other criteria (heartbeat, birth, movement, etc).

…fertilization.

 

[Filippo_Bruno]

He only thought it might not be homicide because the fetus might not be a human being right away

No, he thought the fetus might not have a soul right away.

but we now know that a fetus is always a human being and never anything ELSE or anything LESS than a human being.

We know that biologically it is a human being but the question of a soul is left unsettled, even in current Church teachings.

 

[TarkanAttila]

No, I am saying that someone who has an abortion must justify that act for themselves and their situation. I am simply saying that I am not going to call them a murderer, and will oppose efforts by others to do so.

Do you believe abortion within six weeks can ever be murder? Do you believe abortion at any time can possibly be murder? Again, being a murder out of ignorance does not necessarily make you evil. So being a murderer is not necessarily evil if you do not know what you are doing. (I personally think many who do abort don’t know what they’re doing, but I digress.)

Should it?

Yes. From an economic mindset, it makes absolute sense to oppose abortion. It makes no sense to perpetuate the life of a brain-dead corpse - except to preserve its organs.

Living people create wealth. Wealth goes towards improving the well-being of humanity. Take away people, in present or in future, and wealth will stagnate and/or decrease. Humanity, then, will suffer if it does not produce enough people - at least 1 man and 1 woman for each man and woman of working age, and preferably more.

For the sake of not only the country as a whole, but for your own, for your daughters, and for your wife, not only should human life be supported from conception, but throughout its life.

In any case, the idea that human life only begins after a certain week seems irrelevant to me because all people are dependents. Not on the state, but on each other. Even outside the womb we depend on our parents, on taxpayers, on farmers, workers, etc. So that we depend on a woman other than us for the first nine months of our lives seems small potatoes to the seventy years or so we’ll spend on Earth depending on hundreds, thousands, or even millions.

You are mixing legal and metaphysical terminology. By legal death I mean the point where resuscitating measures and life support no longer need to be administered. Since the mother is providing this sort of life support for an embryo, the analogy seems rather clear.

Not quite. Because while a cadaver can never be self-sustaining again, but embryo can be given time. That’s all it’s a question of. Time. No infinite amount of time and human effort can ever bring the brain-dead back to life. Give an embryo four months and you can untimely rip it out of its mother’s womb and she can be rid of it and it will survive given proper medical care.

You need a legal investigation to confirm that, if the embryo is a legal person. Or should traffic accident deaths be written off as no fault of the driver?

Hm. I honestly do not know how to answer. Good question. I suggest you ask on Catholic Answers Live. Or the AAA section.

But in any case, even if such widespreading legal measures ought to be taken, does that have any bearing on whether an embryo is a person or not? Of course not. One cannot say germs are non-existent simply because it would necessitate spraying every nook and cranny of the house with anti-bacterial fluid to prevent disease. If an embryo is sapient human life - never mind the law, I could not care less about it - we ought to protect it. If germs exist, you ought to protect yourself from them.

You do understand that DNA is matter, yes? And that the matter used to form DNA in embryonic and fetal cells is provided by the mother and only the mother?

http://i2.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/005/545/OpoQQ.jpg
Are you kidding me?

What do you think a sperm cell is and its role is ??? You have two daughters. What part do you think your ejaculate had to do with them? Anything?

Proud father of two daughters.

OK.

For the purposes of this discussion, I am content to leave it at the line I have drawn. You can call anything else you like murder, whether it is mercy killing or withdrawal of life support or a 10-week abortion. Just not an abortion of an embryo under six weeks gestational age.

For an arbitrary reason, unless you should also concede anencephaly outside the womb and brain death are legitimate reasons to, erm, kill a human life. In which case you’d at least have an objective reason.

 

[Filippo_Bruno]

Do you believe abortion within six weeks can ever be murder? Do you believe abortion at any time can possibly be murder? Again, being a murder out of ignorance does not necessarily make you evil. So being a murderer is not necessarily evil if you do not know what you are doing. (I personally think many who do abort don’t know what they’re doing, but I digress.)

No, abortion [edit: didn’t see the 2nd question so added:] before six weeks can’t ever be murder.

What do you think a sperm cell is and its role is ??? You have two daughters. What part do you think your ejaculate had to do with them? Anything?

It provided a set of chromosomes for a single cell. Guess what? Every copy of those chromosomes was made from material provided solely from the mother. All of the trillions or quadrillions or however many copies of the DNA were created by the embryonic cells from nutrients provided by the mother.

To repeat: materially speaking, the father’s contribution to the fetus is nil.

For an arbitrary reason, unless you should also concede anencephaly outside the womb and brain death are legitimate reasons to, erm, kill a human life. In which case you’d at least have an objective reason.

If a fully-grown person had their brain removed or damaged to that extent, I would not consider their killing a murder. It is likely too difficult to write law to cover those cases though.

 

[Robert_Caritas]

…fertilization.

That’s not really a response. But in any case, fertilization is not arbitrary – my previous post (to which you did not respond), makes this point.

It’s post #59, I can just copy it here:
“I agree that it is a waste of time to give arbitrary and relative notions of when a human being begins. Some of these can be a heartbeat, neural activity, movement, the ability to live outside the womb, or birth. These are all arbitrary, depending on various definitions of what a human being is.
What is not arbitrary is that the essential origin of a human being is at conception. With this act there is a human being, without it, there are just cells that are on their way to dying. Several additional steps are going to be required for a human being to be conceived (many), but this is unquestionably the first one.
Therefore, regardless of when a human being becomes complete, the origin of a human being is unquestionably in conception. This is the true first step.”

I don’t see how any of the arguments that you presented can get around this. All the steps that you could present are only intermediary (neurological, heartbeat, etc), they define something, but they don’t indicate a beginning. Indicating any of these passing points as a beginning is arbitrary. Fertilization is the only observable point where nature itself makes a clear, defining, starting point to the human being. Before there is only sexual intercourse, and after this, development of the egg. Both are continuums around a starting point that we can observe.
Now please, take a bit more time to answer, because if you can thoughtfully refute this I would be very interested. But I don’t see how you honestly could, or would want to…

Edit: And, to clarify even a bit more: the development of the brain indicates the beginning of the brain, the development of the heart beat, of the vascular system, etc. Nature has given us a very clear starting point that englobe all of these other starting points of processes (which lead to build a person).

 

[Filippo_Bruno]

Of course fertilization is an arbitrary line. The egg and sperm were both alive before that. Fertilization is just an intermediary step on the part of the egg cell, which is itself an intermediary step on the part of the molecules that comprise it.

Embryonic brain activity is the earliest possible beginning to a consciousness. It is an unambiguous line that is far less morally problematic than fertilization. With fertilization as the line, you end up doing insane things like sterilization of women unfortunate enough to have ectopic pregnancies, or opposing birth control pills on the ground that in some rare cases it may cause a fertilized egg to leave the body.

 

[Robert_Caritas]

“Of course fertilization is not an arbitrary line” Isn’t really a thoughtful response. But it isn’t, because before that there did not exist a single trace in existence of the human being about to come into life.
To say the egg and the sperm are alive is irrelevant. To say that they are people is just not true, for neither and egg or a sperm on its own will ever become anything.
Fertilization is the determining step which states that a human being will come into existence.

About the absurd consequences, in the field of morals we have to admit that we are human beings, and that what moral rules we can come up with will always have exceptions. I don’t think that we can make the vast majority of rules absolute, yet it is not a reason to get rid of them – we just need to apply them intelligently in difficult cases.
Your argument about consciousness is also moot, because neither you nor I can define it with any precision – yet we know that whatever value you find in what you call “consciousness” is something inherent to the biological human being, and we do have an observable beginning for this. I can go more into this, but I doubt that something as ethereal as “consciousness” can be a valid criterion. I also doubt that a 6 week old embryo (nervous system or not), has “consciousness” in the way that we typically understand it for full grown people. This argument is interesting, but it is untenable.

In the creating of a new person, fertilization is not an arbitrary step, but on the contrary it is the defining one. It is the sole step which is non-intermediary.

 

[markeverett49]

No, he thought the fetus might not have a soul right away.

We know that biologically it is a human being but the question of a soul is left unsettled, even in current Church teachings.

This is false. The soul is the form of a living thing. If there is no soul, there is no life, period. When you have a body absent a soul, you have a corpse. Fetuses are not corpses. They are alive. It’s strange of you to rely so heavily on current biology—which I commend—and then when you find yourself in a tough spot try to hide behind Aquinas’s cloak.

 

[Filippo_Bruno]

My reference to Aquinas was merely to point out that you should have heard of someone besides me using this six-week marker – you claimed you had not. I do not mean to rely on his idea of ensoulment. Since I don’t believe in a soul, the question of when ensoulment actually happens is irrelevant to me and my ideas about abortion.

 

[markeverett49]

My reference to Aquinas was merely to point out that you should have heard of someone besides me using this six-week marker – you claimed you had not.

Aquinas OPPOSED abortion, so naturally I didn’t think of him as someone who said abortion was okay…

 

[Filippo_Bruno]

“Of course fertilization is not an arbitrary line” Isn’t really a thoughtful response. But it isn’t, because before that there did not exist a single trace in existence of the human being about to come into life.

This is just incorrect. Every part of a human being exists before fertilization. Humans do not develop ex nihilo.

In the creating of a new person, fertilization is not an arbitrary step, but on the contrary it is the defining one. It is the sole step which is non-intermediary.

It is both arbitrary and intermediary.

 

[Filippo_Bruno]

Aquinas OPPOSED abortion, so naturally I didn’t think of him as someone who said abortion was okay…

It’s certainly possible for something to be sinful without being murder. I am talking about murder, not sin.

 

[markeverett49]

Of course fertilization is an arbitrary line. The egg and sperm were both alive before that. Fertilization is just an intermediary step on the part of the egg cell, which is itself an intermediary step on the part of the molecules that comprise it.

This is an example of what Jeremy Bentham called “nonsense on stilts.” By this logic, it would be okay to kill you, me, or the President right now because wherever we are in our biological development (or decline) it is 'just an intermediary step on the part of the molecules that comprise" us.

Your original position was that the fetus IS a human being but sometimes it is okay to kill a human being. You gave as an example of when it is acceptable to kill a human being, a fetus less than six-weeks old. This being a novel standard (–the normal ones are self-defense, war, capital punishment), I said it was new to me. You said Aquinas held the same view but upon inspection, you backed away from that claim because, uh, Aquinas opposed abortion.

You seem to be making this up as you go along and it sounds more sophomoric by the hour.

 

[Robert_Caritas]

This is just incorrect. Every part of a human being exists before fertilization. Humans do not develop ex nihilo.

It is both arbitrary and intermediary.

No it’s correct. The substance which is going to develop into a fully grown human being only comes into being at fertilization. It is impossible for an ovum and a sperm to do this without fertilization. Nothing in science develops ex nihilo, so it is an irrelevant concept to bring in.

=> The potential for a fully grown human being does not exist until an ovum has been fertilized by an sperm.

You seem to be taking the evolutionary approach that everything can evolve from everything. Thus what makes up a human being is not the egg, but the molecules which exist in this egg, or more precisely, the atoms, or more precisely the protons, the neutrons, and the electrons, and so on. This view denies the existence of anything and everything. For all that then exists are fundamental physical particles, which are themselves probably made up of some other kind of energy.
In this view everything is one, and nothing truly exists. In fact, in this view we only decide what is what because it causes us pain to consider everything as being the same. Thus, everything is arbitrary – we just decide what a person is when it suits us, or our particular sensibilities. Ethics is reduced to aesthetics. Nature really teaches us nothing, because nature is just a big indiscriminate soup of particles.
Tell me if I am correct in characterizing your view.

In any case, this view doesn't hold, because nature does teach us things, and things do exist in nature. Trees exist, animals exist, different types of rocks exist, etc. People exist. We don't decide this. You can't decide that a rock doesn't exist when it's going to hit you in the head. Physical objects exist.
Thus, a human being exists. A sperm is not a human being, neither is an ovum -- this is very very clear. Also, a protein is not a sperm; separate atoms are not a protein, etc. Thus there exists a certain point when certain atoms are binded to make molecules, and a point when these molecules make up cells. And there is a certain point when two of these cells, an ovum and a sperm, cease to be what they were and bind to form a person, something new. 
Our observational capacities pin this down at fertilization.

 

[Filippo_Bruno]

You seem to be making this up as you go along and it sounds more sophomoric by the hour.

Well, to your credit, I think you’re doing an admirable job representing the Catholic side of this.

 

[Robert_Caritas]

You seem to be making this up as you go along and it sounds more sophomoric by the hour.

Well, to your credit, I think you’re doing an admirable job representing the Catholic side of this.

Let’s remember to stay civil. I think that this is getting to an interesting point.
We should also remember to stay open to each others views (which doesn’t mean accepting them), but also allowing for the possibility of our point of view being changed.
Engaging in conversation and dialogue requires this – or people just start using crummy rhetorics to try to falsely dominate debates.

I agree on most things with the positions of the Vatican today, but not on everything.

 

[manualman]

The relationship between the father and the embryo is materially nil. As I pointed out earlier, all of the material of the embryos comes from the mother. This includes all of the physical DNA molecules.

Now you’re devolving from the merely untenable to the simply bizarre. Look up “sperm” in a zoology 101 textbook, will ya? Preferably under mammals. The mother provides all the nutrition from which the zygote replicates itself and begins to construct it’s body. But the genetic material that guides that growth and cell replication is sourced from BOTH father and mother. Perhaps you’re attempting to make a distinction without a difference? Abortion defenders usually resort to it sooner or later.

LOL, your argument is just plain fun! So if I kidnap a 5 pound infant and go on the run and manage to hide until the kid is 6 years old, 50 pounds and I feed him food that is legally mine, then at that point he is 90% my child, right? That’s the extension of your logic. Nice work.

The problem here is one of philosophy and it’s likley to increase in severity over time as our culutre continues to dis-integrate. We quite literally don’t agree on the definition of “is” anymore. It’s like being from different planets.

 

[markeverett49]

Let’s remember to stay civil. I think that this is getting to an interesting point.
We should also remember to stay open to each others views (which doesn’t mean accepting them), but also allowing for the possibility of our point of view being changed.

Point taken. I apologize for the cutting personal remark to F Bruno.