Hiya. Me again. I tried reading the Roe v Wade and other documents but they were so complicated and verbose that I couldn't properly understand them. Will you be able to condense them into laymen's terms or point me to a link thats done that?
I'm not sure what you mean by 'bringing up individually.' but if you could go through the paragraphs that I wrote before and point out how I'm thinking illogically and write a better interpretation of the law and of biology of pregnancy so that I can switch to a more accurate point of view, I would appreciate it.
Hi.
I just read through your long post, and I think the underlying problem in your debate is that you ascribe the full status of a human being to a single zygote, while A2SG (I assume) doesn't.
There is nothing illogical about your reasoning,
provided one agrees with your initial assumption that status as a human being begins with conception. If one doesn't, your whole argument becomes irrelevant.
The problem with your assumption is imo that it blindly transfers a biological concept into a moral one. But morality isn't a biological matter, but a social one. So I think one has to start with a social definition of human being, instead of a biological one*.
Biology is not pivotal for what we commonly call a human being, or a person. Many declarations of human rights are older than our knowledge of crucial biological concepts like DNA. So we don't call someone human because he has similar DNA as we do, but because we share common human characteristics (that
derive from our common genetic information).
While I can't name a person that is (biologically) non human (although certain apes and dolphins may qualify), our imagination can easily create them: Yoda and C3PO, Data and Worf - though not human, would all be considered persons. And if this imagination ever becomes reality (unlikely, but I would say not entirely impossible), then defining human rights by biology becomes very problematic.
*Besides, it is not obvious to me at all why a zygote should have more human rights than any other human cell. The only real difference is that it is totipotent, but why does that suddenly make it a human being?
