The KGB Oracle Forums General Public Discussion (SPECIAL ACCESS) KGB Political Debate Central Massachusetts Death With Dignity initiative

Good question. Better question is what makes human sentient.

While I can't answer your question directly, I can tell you what does not constitutes a child - a blob of cells with no central nervous system and no capacity for sentience.

Well, the best answer I have is that anything that is most likely to become a child, counts. So, an egg by itself doesn't count. Likewise for sperm. A fertilized egg is more likely to become a child than it is to become a toaster oven, so that's where I tend to draw the line. However, I recognize that many fertilized eggs do not develop and that is why my personal stance on the issue is to limit abortions to the first few weeks.

No, if I have to explain to you why a human life is more important than an amoeba or a cat or a bear, then there is no point having this discussion. Here's a hint, it doesn't have anything to do with why or how we are sentient. Rather, it is that we are or have the capacity to be.

Don't you think this is a question you should be able to give some semblance of an answer to if you're going to have an opinion? Personally, I like to educate myself a bit before I form an opinion of any given subject. Perhaps that's a fundamental difference between us.

I know enough to understand limit of my knowledge and not go with an arbitrary answer.

Judging potential to become something is not a good way to create a forward-looking test. It is easy to look back and say, yes this was X and realized its potential to become Y because you don't have to consider many X that did not become Y.

Look at it this way, you don't look at a bag of flow and call it potential cake. It is flower, it has potential to become cake.

You tell me to educate myself, yet you have no clear understanding what human life is. Surely you can see a difference between a human and a bunch of tissue that has a potential to become one.

Here is question for you. A person gets into car accident and suffers irreversible and complete brain damage. Ventilator is used to sustain life. If I turn ventilator off, do I kill a human? Do I kill a sentient being? Can you be a human and not sentient?

wow. if i didnt always post from my stupid phone, i would love to do some cutting and pasting from this thread and the one regarding the big bang we had a few months ago. theres some cognitive dissonance going on around here!

so where were you going with this when you injected abortion into this debate? didnt think it thru, mayhap?
painted yourself into an intellectual corner, perchance?

allow me to throw in another topic: do the right to die-ers and abortionists among us believe in human organ sales? can i sell my aborted fetus?

Epic fail. I addressed your rebuttal before you even made it, and you still made the rebuttal that I knew you would. I really don't think you even read my posts.

Let's use your cake analogy though. Take some flour (sperm), on its own, as I stated, not going to become a cake. Take some eggs and milk (egg), again, as I said, not going to become a cake. Mix them together and put them in an oven (womb), and the chances of them becoming a cake just shot through the roof.

A cat can have kittens in a oven, but that don't make 'em biscuits.

Both are issues of control over your body. Stop pissing on my grave and read the thread.

No you didn't. You alluded to human life, minus sentience, being somehow exceptional. It isn't, unless you bring in metaphysical soul, but at that point logical argument is over. Hence I started questioning you with a hypothetical brain death example that you have avoided.

Just come out already and say that you believe that fertilized egg is precious because it has soul and stop beating around the bush.

I think the pertinent question , is if it is not *yet a human - why should the woman be obligated by law to keep the oven on? That oven costs resources to operate, and she might not be ready to eat cake yet. In fact if the flour did become a cake, it might be an almost certainty that the cake would simply spoil and go bad, because the baker wasnt prepared for it to be baked.

But if its not a cake yet, your not wasting cake by turning the oven off. Just the batter. Or, maybe you screwed up the mix and the batter is no good.

Either way, it might be better for the bakers, and the eventual cake to be baked at another time.

Are you delusional or did you really only read the first part of my post?

Amazing.
Yes, you're killing a human. No, it has nothing to do with a "soul." It doesn't matter whether or not you're still aware. The reason is, that from here to "reason to kill anyone we want" is a pretty short step.

Derid,
I figured my "first few weeks" caveat would cover that.

My problem with abortion is two fold. One, the father has no say. Two, at some point (I said a few weeks in) the "random mass of tissue" is far enough along that it is, by any reasonable measure, a human and therefore its life is sacrosanct.