Thanks Bex for a detailed argument. You make some valid points.
I hope Russ' fixes it soon too.
Me too, it is hard to read in this format. Maybe inserting a wide picture will fix it ...
[color:"red"](edit: it did, but forced it wider to the right)[/color]
Well Linda, RAZD can produce any "data" he wishes, it does not take away the diabolical reality. "out of sight, out of mind" as they say.
You may find we are closer to agreement than you think at first hand.
I would like to discuss the issue without any emotional bias or extraneous arguments.
mur..der ..noun
Law. the killing of another human being under conditions specifically covered in law.
I think using this is introducing an emotional argument and the appeal to emotion logical fallacy. If you use the law here to justify your application of the definition, then you must also realize that abortion is (currently) legal under the law, so it is specifically excluded from your usage.
This is also extraneous to the issue of whether what we are dealing with is a human life. If your argument were completely valid you would not need to include this in your argument: laws are made by human societies to represent relatively average social and (hopefully) secular values that respect the beliefs of all people in the society.
Either one believes that human life starts and becomes a person at conception (granting it civil rights), or that it starts after a baby is born.
Or some point in between, and the gist of my argument is that some point between these two positions is much more accurate, credible and ethical.
The definition of life at conception fails for a couple of reasons. One of which is that nothing is added by conception, the living cells and the DNA existed before that, and you can trace those back to the origin of life (by whatever theory you care to embrace), so it is just an arbitrary point. Second, it just plain does not define a human life -- from my thread
Legal Life, Legal Death and Stem Cell Research - resolving the ethical question:
The problem with the "life begins with conception" (zygote formation) argument, is that not all zygotes naturally survive to become a fetus, to say nothing of reaching the ultimate maturation of the process to produce a living breathing thinking laughing human being.
quote: day 7 - 9 - Blastocyst implants in wall of uterus (55% of Zygotes never reach this stage.)
quote: But the actual rate of miscarriage is even higher since many women have very early miscarriages without ever realizing that they are pregnant. One study that followed women's hormone levels every day in order to detect very early pregnancy found a total pregnancy loss rate of 31 percent.
At 20 weeks the rate of miscarriages is 31% - of the 45% zygotes that implanted long enough to affect the hormone production (a reaction to the implantation process). That means we are down to 69% of 45% = 31% success and 55% + 31% of 45% = 69% failure due to natural causes by week 20.
quote: As an example, in 1/3 of miscarriages occurring before 8 weeks, there is a pregnancy sac but no embryo inside. This means the egg was fertilized and the cells began to divide, but an embryo did not develop.
Over 70% of zygotes are not capable of producing a living breathing thinking laughing human being.
This basic set of facts shows that well over half of conceptions are just not really human beings - a single cell that passes out of the uterus is no different than a skin cell that is shed, an ejected blastula is no different than tissue that is accidentally or intentionally cut off (like a toenail), and an empty pregnancy sac is not a being of any kind, whether the cells are alive or not.
I represented this graphically in
my second response to RussIt shows that a zygote is not the same as a human life. It's the same as the "all A is B, B! therefore A" logical fallacy:
<img src="http://herballure.com/ForumExtras/Images/wyjbammegu.jpg">
(relative size not to scale, sketch is to illustrate the fallacy)
Where "A" represents the zygotes that become human babies and "B" represents all the conception zygotes. Most of "B" does not contain any "A" and therefore you cannot say B=A.
The point being that if we are going to talk rationally about human life then we need a definition that does represent A, and that trying to use B to define A is a false representation of reality. There is something in A that is additional to what is in the B that is notA.
Here are some pictures ...
The question is not how human a fetus
looks, but how human it
is. The development of the whole individual does not occur in the first or last weeks, rather it is a continual process, one that is not complete (normally) until it is time for birth. The evidence from premature births is that a fetus less than 24 weeks is not likely to survive and those that do are usually severely impaired because they never fully develop.
From
Premature babies' disability risk:
Just over 1,200 were born alive and 811 were admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit. Of these 314 survived to go home.
The first phase of the study revealed at two and a half years old 50% of those studied had some form of disability.
In a quarter of the children severe disabilities were identified, including cerebral palsy, blindness, deafness and arrested development.
The latest results show that 40% of the surviving children had moderate to severe problems in cognitive development at the age of six, compared to 2% of a control group of their classmates.
Bright Asamany, born at 24 weeks, is one of the most severely disabled of all the children who were born in 1995 ... his father, Kennedy, says ... if they had another baby born as early as Bright, he would say "turn off the machine, there is no need to continue".
These premature babies, "preemies," are not born fully functioning (mature) babies, they needed machines to replace functions of the natural womb to finish their development, and would normally have died without them. In one sense they are not fully "born" until they can survive off the life support machines, but it is normal social convention to consider them born as they have been removed from the womb.
Only 38.7% of the preemies admitted to the neo-natal intensive care survived, and of those only 50% did not have significant complications\disabilities. This is a 19.4% "success" rate at this point of development. This is where they are doing everything possible to save lives. Where such procedures are not available the natural result is normally death of the fetus.
Note that this would in effect make the point of "uniform life" to be, not birth, so much as the earliest possible point at which {assisted premature} birth would be medically feasible without causing significant detrimental effect on the end result.
Can you tell me what %human this fetus is?
. . . . <img src="http://herballure.com/ForumExtras/Images/rwinffbczw.jpg">
Human Person: This is any human life that is considered to be a person. Our laws and constitution grant human person civil rights. One of these rights is the right to life. The disagreement is that an embryo/unborn child doesn’t become a person until after birth, and thus doesn’t contain those civil rights given to all of us. This is the core disagreement.
And this compares to the question of human life when a terminally ill or injured person is being kept "alive" through medical intervention with life support, the question comes down to "when is it ethical to remove life support and let natural death occur."
PersonhoodThis standard is a little more difficult to establish on a broad cultural and social basis except by taking into considerations the beliefs of each individual family involved and the diversity of levels acceptable to individuals. From
Biology, Consciousness, and the Definition of Death (click):
(NOTE: these are excerpts - with some loss of context: see whole paper for complete context)
Some philosophers and scientists have argued that the whole-brain standard does not go far enough. Several leading authors on the subject have advocated a higher-brain standard, according to which death is the irreversible cessation of the capacity for consciousness. This standard is often met prior to whole-brain death, which includes death of the brainstem - that part of the brain which allows spontaneous respiration and heartbeat but is insufficient for consciousness. Thus, a patient in a permanent coma or permanent vegetative state (PVS) meets the higher-brain, but not the whole-brain, standard of death.
From the present perspective, then, the core-meaning argument does not settle the question of the nature of human death. A more promising approach, on this view, is to take seriously the fact that we are not only organisms; we are also persons. According to one prominent argument for the higher-brain standard, the capacity for consciousness is essential to persons - essential in the strict philosophical sense of being necessary: Any being lacking this capacity is not a person. It follows that when someone permanently loses the capacity for consciousness, there is no longer a person associated with the body. The person who was, is no more - that is to say, she is dead. Thus, the argument goes, human death is captured by the higher-brain standard.
Finally, any effort to base a standard for human death on "our" values confronts the problem of value pluralism. While liberal intellectuals, and perhaps a majority of Americans, are likely to regard a future of permanent unconsciousness as meaningless, many people - some of them religious fundamentalists - would disagree. For the dissenters, biological life in PVS or permanent coma is at least life and therefore valuable (perhaps infinitely so). For at least some of these people, such a state is meaningful because it is a gift from God, a gift that must not be thrown away through active killing - or defined away with a new definition of death.
It is firmly established, both in case law and in medical ethics, that competent adult patients have the right to refuse life-supporting medical treatments, even artificial nutrition and hydration. By the same token, an appropriate surrogate can refuse life-supports on behalf of the legally incompetent if there is sufficient reason to believe the patient would have refused treatment in the present circumstances. Because of this broad legal and moral right to refuse treatment, life-supports that are unwanted or are considered unhelpful - including life-supports for permanently unconscious patients - can be terminated without first declaring the patient dead.
This last paragraph is the key: until the fetus has achieved the status of legally competent the "appropriate surrogate" - in this case the family - can decide to terminate life support, based on their perception of "personhood" discussed above. If the patient naturally expires due to failure of the {circulatory and respiratory functions} to maintain life on their own, then the legal issue is settled.
Certainly in cases where continuing a pregnancy endangers the life of the mother, the doctors could perform an early-term C-section, and once the {fetus\premature child} was removed the family could direct that "no heroic measures" be taken to see if the {fetus\premature child} survives or dies a natural death on its own - this choice is currently legal, as there are people of certain religious beliefs that they would chose to let nature take its course and have insisted on their right to their beliefs. This certainly fits with the end of the material quoted above:
[color:"purple"]"Because of this broad legal and moral right to refuse treatment, life- supports that are unwanted or are considered unhelpful - including life-supports for permanently unconscious patients - can be terminated without first declaring the patient dead."[/color]
I submit for your consideration, that any method that results in the removal of a fetus from a womb, but that does not harm or endanger the {patient} in any way except for the "removal of life-support" -- and that removal done only upon the request of the "appropriate surrogate" (here that would be the immediate family) -- and where the {patient} dies, the result is legal death due to natural causes.
Ethically we must treat the beginning of a distinct human life in the same manner that we treat the end of that life, and applying a pluralist definition that covers a spectrum would be the only way to meet the needs of all people involved in such decisions. Different families will make different choices, based on their own beliefs, beliefs that are protected in the constitution and in the existing laws of this country.
What makes it a human life? I believe it needs to follow certain characteristics to be a human life and thus a human person:
“…is biologically alive. It fulfills the four criteria needed to establish biological life:
metabolism,
growth,
reaction to stimuli, and
reproduction.” (4)
Reproduction: It’s DNA already contains the functions it will need to design that needed to reproduce at puberty.
This definition applies to all life, and they are equivocating on reproduction ability (but it's a problem inherent in the definition of life, a different issue altogether).
A proper application of this definition would mean that you are not a fully human life until you reach puberty and are actually capable of reproduction. People that are sterile can still have the DNA for reproduction. This is rather silly, but it is just as arbitrary as using conception or the (traditional) birth as defining point in the spectrum of human life.
The real question is like asking at what
precise wavelength does yellow become blue:
<img src="http://razd.evcforum.net/Pictures/CvE/aspectrum.jpg">
Different people will choose different wavelengths based on their (so far) constitutionally protected individual beliefs.
Enjoy.
[color:"green"]
Note: my time is limited, so I only choose threads of particular interest to me and I cannot guarantee a reply to all responses (particularly if they do not discuss the issue/s),
and I expect other people to do the same. Thank you for your consideration.[/color]
