Apo said- It's not an appeal to ignorance, it's a genuine request for anyone to show me how a fetus or embryo is not a human or not alive.
Being that you haven't even defined 'life' yet in a way that doesn't include inorganic matter ('animate' doesn't cut it, as sperm is animated and motile), you need to back up a step....
Apo said- No, you really missed my point here.
You haven't even MADE a point, Apo. You haven't even defined 'life' is a manner that doesn't mean menstruating women and males with nocturnal emissions (or who masturbate) aren't violating the sanctity of life!
Apo said- I didn't say all living things have the same value. You asked me to define "life", so I did. My word definitions were intended to make the point that if it's a being with its own set of genes, and those genes are homo sapiens, then it's a living human. This is such a simple, undeniable fact that people end up having to go to great lengths to justify abortion, coming up with strained definitions of "human", "living", etc.
Well, you just changed the goalposts, but I'll let it slide....
Great, so the hairs on your head, your finger nails, sloughed skin cells, etc, ALL contain their "own sets of homo sapien genes": are those alive, too, by your new definition? Should loofa pads be outlawed, and brushes now be considered as weapons of mass murder, since they are don't respect the sanctity of human life?
Apo said- Which capacity a baby will eventually possess if it is allowed to continue developing naturally in the womb. How is a potential person worth less than an actual person?
Adam said- In the same way a potential crime is not possible; a crime must ACTUALLY OCCUR to be prosecuted.
Apo said- Those aren't comparable situations. Someone can think about a crime with no guarantee of doing it.
(Side note: NOT if you're a Xian, since Jesus said a married man who looks at a women with lust in his heart has already committed adultery; Jesus introduced the concept of thought crimes, where even contemplating the act was tantamount to committing the act. Of course, most Xians simply ignore the completely bog-shot crazy extremist words of Jesus, since eg giving everything you own to the poor, and inviting the poor to dinner is.... well, those poor people SMELL!!)
Apo said- A fetus will eventually become a child with their own personality, barring a miscarriage, which is an aberration in the natural process.
NOPE, not so: miscarriages are not aberrations, but are actually an IMPORTANT PART of the process, serving as an error-checking mechanism where the mother's body determines there's a problem and decides to abort the infant.
From:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001488.htm
Most miscarriages are caused by chromosome problems that make it impossible for the baby to develop. Usually, these problems are not related to the mother or father's genes.
Obviously Mother Nature's error-checking mechanism is not perfect, since severely-deformed and special-needs babies are born, but Mother Nature herself is the single-greatest aborter of fetuses, by a long-shot.
http://www.tommys.org/page.aspx?pid=383
- About one in seven recognised pregnancies end in miscarriage, while the incidence of spontaneous (unrecognised) miscarriage is estimated to be 50% of all pregnancies [2, 3].
- One in four women who get pregnant will experience a miscarriage. This figure drops to one in five when only taking women who have had a positive pregnancy test into consideration [4].
So to pull us back to your original question, which is why we're now in the weeds:
Apo said- How is a potential person worth less than an actual person?
Mother Nature apparently thinks some 'potential persons' don't have the right to life and spontaneously aborts them; in other words, Mother Nature is essence is giving those who survived her scrutiny and error-checking process ('actual persons' in your words) as being are more worthy than potential persons who were miscarried,since actual persons survived the pregnancy.
Apo said- Thinking about a crime does not lead naturally to doing it -- I had a co-worker who admitted that when she worked at a bank, she was always fantasizing about walking out with a bag of money. She was never close to doing it, however, no matter how many times she thought about it, for the usual reasons that people will choose not to commit crimes. A baby, by contrast, is on a natural, straight-line path to maturing and becoming a child and then an adult. One thing naturally follows the other.
You're off in the weeds, building another straw-man argument.
My point was to focus on 'potential' in terms of the TEMPORAL INEVITABILITY, and NOT considering commiting a crime which the person could later decide NOT to do.
NONE of which changes the fact that U.S. law ignores 'potential harm' that MAY or MIGHT have been inflicted: you can ONLY sue others for losses that ACTUALLY happened, NOT potentially happened. It's why you cannot sue someone after a 'close call' in traffic, where you ALMOST got into an accident.
If we allowed that kind of illogical nonsense to enter into the court system, the courts would be facing an even far-worse back-log that we have, with lawyers quibbling on speculative claims of potential damages that might have occurred, where the plaintiff's imagination is the only limit.
Which leads to exactly the kind of absurdity you mentioned:
Apo said- To illustrate the absurdity of your analogy, if a child is killed, do we prosecute the killer or do we say, "Well, the child might have fallen sick and died anyway before reaching adulthood. They might have died in an accident." On the contrary: society actually deals more harshly with people who harm children than any other class of criminal.
That's EXACTLY the kind of silly-sauce speculation playing "what if?" games that are completely pointless, since NO ONE possesses prescient foresight of what will happen in the future. Operating on the basis of potentiality, the defendent could argue, "Well, I know the child was going to grow up to become a Hitler, and would kill 20 millions Jews! So I did society a favor by killing him!"
We deal in the here and now, and NOT in the future, UNTIL a damage actually occurs in the present (and the impact can be then projected into the future, by creating an estimate).
Apo said- Why is a child's life considered more valuable than an adult's? I wonder if you can tell me.
I've laid out MANY logical arguments:
1) the courts give priority to those who have been born, partly due to the difficulty of determining when life actually begins.
2) Women own their own bodies (self-autonomy, patient autonomy), and enjoy the right to determine what happens to their own bodies, including the right to choice to terminate the pregnancy.
3) Mother Nature (God?) gives priority to those who have already been born (declared as winnas!), since the act of being born is crossing the 'finish/beginning line'.
Adam
