Well, you should keep, cherish and nurture all the hair you find in the tub drain then. DNA can't be the answer. Ultimately, you are arguing for future tense and full human potential. That seems like the bottom line to me. The clump of cells has the potential and a certain good probability of becoming an independently functioning human being if left to fully gestate, etc. Isn't that the final crux? That starts a whole extra set of philosophical questions for me. If a woman takes RU486, she is aborting a very small clump of cells. If her partner had worn a condom, he interrupted a process that had all the potential, the DNA parts, and probability to have very well led to a human being, right? So at some level, it is again somewhat arbitrary where we draw the line. The line must always be drawn, and the decision is always political and difficult. I can see that exact cellular conception makes sense, but I also understand a boundary of, say, brainwaves, or a boundary set by the ability to live sans umbilical. Other, more disturbing lines can be drawn with good arguments in either direction too.
That's why I'm against contraception, etc. etc. why we are from different planets. There's a difference in hair in a drain though, it doesn't have the other three factors necessary to be human...that it be living, Individual, and a being.
Not to split hairs (har har har! sorry), but: Many cells can live separate from the human body for short periods of time. How is a hair cell any less "individual" than a newly fertilized egg, technically speaking? And finally, the word "being" is what we are arguing here, and it is philosophical, subjective, as opposed to an objective term. Anyway, I agree that the hair is basically a red hairing, but I don't agree with the DNA argument in final analysis. Honestly, I can appreciate your stance wrt contraception. I respect your planet. At least that is a sort of consistency. However, I think that stance is very negative for the wide world, as we are scheduled to have 12 billion humans by 2050. The good Lord did give us brains, and either your abstinence programs are going to have to take a quantum leap over human nature, or we need to promote contraception in a big way. Our planet and its humans are in big trouble in terms of water, food, and disease.
Doesn't matter anyway, in 500 years there's only going to be Muslims, Mormons, and Catholics because the rest of society won't be able to keep the 2.1 birth rate needed for a civilization up. Its already happening in Europe where Europeans are dying out and their being overun by Muslim immagrants. WRT the whole DNA thing, le tme give you one def. of being that seems to make sense and doesn't take on any phil. relig. aspects-- Self-Contained, and self-intergrating entity with its own nature.
Have you ever flipped through a biology text on the first day of class and seen the elephantiasis picture? Or read about thirty pound tumors, or parasitic feti in fetu live in the abdominal cavities of their brothers/sisters for years? The human body is capable of amazing internal distortions, certainly enough to contain the analagous seven pound, six ounce structure of the female body. (Note: the germ cell teratoma is not gender-specific, can sprout from either sperm or ova.) Your toenails are stamped with human DNA. The dust in the air, your skin cells, are stamped with human DNA. This is the exact same DNA found in the initial stages of the fetus, in similar cellular complexities and masses. It is ok to clip your fingernails intentionally, and it is ok to scratch your back, intentionally, so why is it not ok to terminate that initial clump of cells, intentionally? You say that it will (more aptly, could) turn into a human. But in saying so, you are arguing that the human is the essential part of the equation, that which is worth saving. That which leads to the human, the cells, being nonhuman, then, has no equal or relevant moral standing. The initial clump of cells (let me be clear, not the third trimester fetus) thus has no meaning, and no relative intrinsic worth. Clearly, the DNA is not the important part. There's human DNA all over the place: in your clothes hamper, your comb, your tissues. It's the humanity of the fetus/child that you want to protect. I don't think you care about DNA? I think you care about babies, human babies. What exactly is human, except for their genetic structure, about the joining of gametes? Two individual cells that operate as most other animal cells: unthinking, unknowing. How is that at all related to a human being who can link Plato and 'yada yada' in the same sentence?
what if i told you roe v. wade already made abortions illegal after the first trimester (month 3) except when the mother's health is in jeopardy? that's the way the law was written. it's been applied to have an expansive definition of "health" so as to justify virtually any abortion you can imagine, right up to the point where the baby is halfway out of it's mother's body.
great..i encourage you to do some reading on why abortions are performed and when they're most performed. congressional testimony is good. the reports from the states that break this down is good too. i know i've read colorado's online before. i think you'll be shocked by what you learn from these government reports.
Yes, I am aware of that fact. I actually saw somewhere a law that was being written that just being born didn't qualify you as a life. You had to be branded as a viable life. So technically if the child was born and the mother didn't like the way it looked they could saw that it wasn't a viable life and gust let it die. Now that would be scarry.
Ok, quotes getting taken out of context. I stand by the neccesary factors for life, that it be individual, living, human, and a being... DNA in and of itself might be human, but it lacks metabolism, growth, etc. as well as the ability of being a being, self contained, self-integrating. The same logic goes for the dead fetus no matter if its in a male or female. The intentionality claim that I made still stands... But the zygote does exhibit these 4 qualities...distinct from mother and father (has seperate but realted DNA), is going through metabolic life processes (the teratoma would do this as well as the first, and as I said it is not aborted per se.) Human (Human DNA), and is its own individual being (self-contained, self-intergrating entity) In other words, from conception, the zygote has everything neccessary to proceed through the developement of a human. Some may be mutated, etc. but this does not change the fact that they are still distinct, living, human, and individual in being. No other human single cell has this inherent capacity, save the teratoma, which once again, as I've said, does not fit the rationale for being aborted. Your last question once again presumes that thinking is the only criteria for being human. I don't know where or how you get this, but it makes me feel bad for the r****ded folk out there, for I feel they are human from a strictly scientific viewpoint.
(As long as the current administration isn't ginning up the figures like it does for some other "scientific" data,) absolutely will do.
All right its quittin' time here in the DC, I'll try to hop back in the debate before I get to bed tonight. Everyone's been real cordial and I'm glad for that after the "debate" yesterday at the rally.
I am not saying you want to ban the book. I am merely saying that many of the same people who are fighting against abortion would also fight against teaching that book to young girls. Key being girls in high school or younger.
I already tried to demonstrate how your definition of life is seriously flawed, and can only reword. I'll spare you as you spared me your spiel. But this last sentence caught my eye: The whole point of the teratoma analogy is not that it's something cool I read about in my Weekly Reader. It's that this rare form of cancer fits, rather adroitly, your definition of what makes a human fetus sacred. It's a bloody cancer! Cancer! Of course it should be aborted! As I tried to earlier state with my other analogy of forebrainless babies, from a strictly scientific viewpoint of course such babies are indeed human. My point, restated: I believe the popular argument is that abortion should be outlawed because it has prevented millions of fetuses from becoming human men and women who would have otherwise led rich, fulfilling lives. I surely hope that when you're working to prevent abortion that you do not have in mind the functionally braindead as your cause. I hope that you do not have the double helix or the particularities of human Chromosome 12 as your cause. I hope that, as you work to prevent abortion, you have the idea in your head that the feti you save will be able to go on to achieve some level of happiness or, barring that, some sense of purpose in life. And I can see no way that you can remove human consciousness, human thought as the means to attain that goal, remove it from the table while simultaneously advocating the end of abortion so that babies can be born to grow up and be able to think, to feel and to love. Otherwise, what exactly are you fighting for? It's been fun...
Being in the movie business, I have to keep abreast of such things. That and my Olsen Twins fansite www.fourorbsofglory.com
these are documents that pre-date the current administration. they're congressional testimonies...and they are reports from the states. abortion clinics are required to provide statistical details of all the abortions they perform in a year, including reason for the abortions and term at which it was done.
not if the definition is that, if left to its own natural state, it could develop into a human being. that's the key part you're missing here, and I'm kinda surprised you keep harping on this. that "tumor" can never, ever turn into a human...it will never ever, even under the most liberal approaches, be worthy of legal rights. fetuses, on the other hand, can...and generally do. they are, in fact, just 9 months away, at the longest, from taking a breath on their own in this world.
You have no idea how ironic I find this statement, but you don't know me personally, so how could you? I was an adult, doing my dreaming, pondering the state of my ideals, balancing, discarding, embracing my philosophies, my religious beliefs or the lack of them, having sex, fast and slow, and wondering if we would survive Richard Nixon, among other things, before you were a twinkle of a gleam in your parent's eyes. I'm glad you are so absorbed in your beliefs. That's what we do in this country, we hope, let people have the freedom to believe what they will. Just don't take away the freedoms of others in your quest for whatever turns you on... idealistically, philosophically or otherwise.
Fetal myopia.... I hope you can see the humor on the huge oversight in your otherwise moving testament. Oh yeah, the Nixon dig kind of distracted too!
Hey, I wear contac lenses... I can see fine! And I can't help it if Nixon seems distracting. He was distracting.
