Slowman wrote:
windywave wrote:
This has nothing to do with religion. It has to do with intellectual honesty in acknowledging abortion terminates life. The debate is over when that is acceptable. Simple question you skipped over.... when does this set of living cells that aren't human life in your opinion morph into "human life" in your opinion.
everybody on your side of this says the issue has nothing to do with religion.
at least one of us holds a degree in biology. so let's use that education. as you put it, dig into the DNA of a zygote. it's human DNA. so is the DNA in every cell in a human's body, including the skin cells we slough off every day. i hope we've dispensed with this argument.
as to when a zygote becomes a human, here's what we know: a zygote is not as sentient as you or i. ascribing full rights to a zygote is a religious decision. but ascribing zero rights to a fetus that's full term is also problematic. so, we pick a point in the middle, based on science, based on reason, we choose a reasonable accommodation that makes half our society happy, and angers the one-fourth that sit on either extreme end.
Permit me to interject here with an example of how the law struggles with the biology in this area.
In some jurisdictions, it is a criminal offense to kill an unborn child. In many of those jurisdictions, the unborn child needs to be "viable" at the time of the killing for it to be murder. But, many other jurisdictions do not have that requirement. Finally, a handful of jurisdictions do not provide any criminal protection for the unborn child. So, how can the law call it murder when a perp shoots a pregnant woman, killing the unborn child, but, it is not murder when a doctor ends the pregnancy at the same stage of development?
Don't mistake my position here. I do NOT believe in outlawing abortion. I am morally opposed to abortion, but, absolutely, positively, think it needs to be an individual's own moral decision, not something for the law to dictate.
But, see above for how the law struggles here.
If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went. - Will Rogers
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