by Country Girl 12 Replies latest jw friends
Just curious about this. There have been a few times in criminal history when a person was charged with killing a woman, and an additional murder charge was added on for killing her fetus if she was pregnant. Seems to be a prosecutor's paradise. In light of Roe v. Wade, how can you be charged with killing someone that doesn't exist?
So the fetus only counts if the Mom says it does?
CG
Yes it does but not consciousness that takes a short time after birth and developement...not sure when so are people in a Coma alive? This debate is difficult to explain.
A person is pronounced dead when their brainwave activity stops. I say pronounce a person alive when their brainwave activity starts.
catbert:
A person is pronounced dead when their brainwave activity stops. I say pronounce a person alive when their brainwave activity starts.
Sounds eminently sensible to me. Just a technical note. A human can be alive without a functioning brain but cannot be a person. It is for this reason that doctors feel quite safe in removing life-support from someone who has become brain-dead. Similarly, while a developing foetus is indisputably alive, until it has a functioning brain it cannot be a person.
Sunnygal41:
FD, you are absolutely correct. I spoke from MY view. My mistake. I stand corrected.
Aww. It's no fun unless you fight back!
Depends if you see conception as a singular event or a series of events
Well once an egg is fertilized it begins cell division from zygote to blastocyst.......
Once implanted though it begins to be nourished by the mother much like a seed planted.
Some feel that fertilization is conception others see implantation as conception.
In fact I only suffer morning sickness on the day of implantation when I am pregnant, that is my personal tell.
Laws vary from state to state and often depends on the stage of pregnancy.
Funky, I don't LIKE to fight!!! I'm truly a SUNNY GAL!!! LOL!! But, I would like to say something here. I tend to respond to threads with my heart and my gut, and not always from my brain.........and, although I did very well in science in school, I have definitely gravitated more towards a spiritual worldview. I do admire that you approach things from the logical, scientific angle, though. One other thing I DO want to mention though that might carry a bit of weight: I am a woman. I have been pregnant. I considered abortion. Yet, when I went to the Dr. and thinking I was in total possession of my decision, I totally burst into tears after I said I was there to schedule an abortion..........I was blown away by my own reaction.........but, this is MY own PERSONAL experience with this topic, and NOT scientific. But, in actuality, there are some forms of life that are totally asexual. DUH!!!
It's not at all simple. And in your simple "explanation" you failed to answer the question. In reality, life began around 3.8 billion years ago and has continued in an unbroken line ever since. If the question is: Does a unique organism begin its existence at conception, the answer is a qualified yes,
Exactly what I would have said....the sperm and egg are every bit as alive as the zygote the moment after conception. Conception is the beginning of individuality and the beginning of a new path of development (as opposed to the different lifecycle of spermatozoa and ova), but life continues unbroken from one moment to the next. And what about identical twins? In that case, individuality begins at some point AFTER conception.
The ethical problem is the lack of an obvious moment when humanity (with the cultural and legal rights pertaining thereto) begins. Humanity is culturally conceived as a binary division between human and non-human. Life and development are smooth continuous processes without the kind of discontinuitues where rights could be unambiguously introduced. This falls on both sides of the "rights of the unborn" issue, where the only two obvious moments that could be appealed to are conception and birth. The fetus one second before birth is not any less alive or human than the baby one second after birth. And the single-cell diploid that results a second after conception is simply a merger of the two haploid cells that existed a second before conception; the life and material content of the cell is the same, although the merger creates an opportunity for a new trajectory of development. Unless we insist on one of these points as the magical moment when humanity and human rights springs into existence, it must lie somewhere in between. The problem is that because development is so continuous and unbroken, there is no obvious point in between that could serve as the dividing line required by the binary division; any proposed point would be altogether arbitrary. That leads to the eternal legal and social dispute, for neither the moments of birth and conception are truly discontinuous and there are no other developmental moments in between that could bear the weight of a binary division between legal and moral rights.
In short, our moral and legal systems like clear-cut divisions between categories but nature is rarely that neat.
:Does life begin at conception?
I don't know about anyone else, but mine did.
Farkel
Does life begin at conception?
Mine did.
