I did not say Neon was condoning it. Science seems to be proving that a baby is not a real entity until around 3 years old. Start your reading at the start of the our conversation. The argument of when a person becomes a person has gone on for decades also. Some say as soon as the cell splits and grows. Some say the alien being is a human in the last three months in the womb. Now science say 3 years after being born? Higher brain function? A baby will start to laugh and smile as early as 3 months.

Sometimes I wish they could put a sterilizing agent in the water supply to prevent accidental and unwanted pregnancies. When one wants to have a child they take a counteracting agent to get pregnant.

That might be the only thing that will solve this issue but of course it would raise a whole lot more.

That's not entirely true, it is a living breathing creature (that alone does not make it a non entity), its just that it does not have any of the mental capabilities yet that make a human a human. This is why there is also such a huge grey area when it comes to abortion, as development is continuous, and not based on steps or stages. Where exactly do you draw the line. Many animal infants will do similar as a baby laughing and smiling, and much earlier depending on the species.

I wouldn't argue about that idea provided it worked and didn't bring about other health issues.

Therein lies the rub. Even if they could invent such a drug and there were no unintended side effects it'd be impossible to constantly distribute it over the entire world.

Anything less than world wide distribution would cause one ethnic group to quickly outbreed the others resulting in collapse of the entire system.

To define when human life begins - you can take two approaches. One is to try and define what human life "IS", which has beewn the way society has attempted to deal with this question. The other option is to define it by its opposite - death. After all, you can't "understand" what light is if you don't understand or can define what darkness is. I choose the latter path as it provides a logical, reasonable and, personally speaking, morally acceptable end point.

Human death is the state in which a human being, having been at some point "alive" meets the following criteria:

The mind and body of a person cease to function together at any level for the continued survival of both.

As examples - if you have your brain stem severed, your dead. Your heart will cease, your lungs won't move, etc. If you snap your neck, you may be paralized, but the brain still maintains the ability to direct critical functions like pulminary and respitory. See the difference? If you have a heart attack and your ticker explodes, the body ceases to provide the brain with what it needs to survive. If you have a mild stroke, your mental capacity may be diminished, but your brain and body still work together, though perhaps not as well.

Its important to note the "together" part, because the mind and body share a symbiotic relationship.

Now, for the sake of simplicity, I would point out that until the moment of birth, a baby in the womb is still semi-parasitic in nature. Thus it is true that a child does not, for the majority of a pregnancy, have a body that could continue functioning on its own. But in the unborn child, there exists at a certain point - and that point is different with every baby, where it slowly changes from being parasitic, living entirely off the host, to being semi-parasitic. It is at this point where the brain is sufficiently formed to begin "self-regulation" - or as I put it in an earlier post - when the brain tells the heart to beat, and the heart does so in response to electrical impulses from the brain. At this first, incredible moment, the "clump of cells" has grown beyond that stage, and become a living entity. At that moment, the criteria for a human to be "ALIVE" - the body and mind working together in symbiosis - is met.

Another point to confirm this argument - is the definition of a miscarriage. A pregnancy is considered "lost" or "miscarried" at the point it either SHOULD have definitively established that symbiosis of brain and body (meaning it won't), or at the time that the brain and body, for reasons unknown, cease to function.

I have always found it odd we could tell when a pregnancy was "dead", but we never could define life as the opposite of that same death.

This is why I can see early term abortions as morally acceptable, though they also should represent a source of sadness for society itself. While I understand how some can view abortion as a murder from the outset, those views are based off a religious view that is often held to without a clear understanding of its reasoning.

Anyone have a different view on the "where life begins" thought that they want to share the reasoning on so that we can all consider it?

BRAVO :yeah:

If killing a fetus is murder, when should a woman who miscarries be charged with involuntary manslaughter? (There is no malice of forethought in Involuntary Manslaughter)

Suppose the mother was a drug user (an illegal act) and miscarries, could they be charged with Constructive Manslaughter? (Constructive Manslaughter occurs when someone kills, without intent, in the course of committing an unlawful act.)

Suppose the mother was a heavy smoker/drinker (a legal act) and miscarries, could they be charged with Negligent Manslaughter.

If killing a fetus is murder, then it has to be murder across the board right?

All I can say on judging when a greasy collection of cells becomes a human being, is this: they once showed a video on TV, which was I think ultrasonic material, although I may remember that detail wrong (it is many years ago). It was a film taken during the process of aborting, and you saw a very tiny little figur resting in the womb, when the instruments were inserted, it started to move before it even was touched, and it seemed to try to get in the opposite direction. That was a shocking observation, that's why I have never forgotten it. The immediate reaction by me was that this thing was beign alarmed that somethign was coming it's way. The next part was to see this very vaguely human silhouetted figure getting ripped into pieces and the pieces being sucked or pushed to the lower left corner of the picture.

It is absurd wanting to draw the line beyond which abortion should be avoided on cognitive processes when you know that these very cognitive processes are extremely unfunctional and uncompete even in the first months after birth.
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As unsentimental I am about a featureless mass of cells, a clump of grease that has neither form nor function nor any characteristic of a human, as aware I am that the criterion for setting a timeline must be defined far more subtle, and that what happend in that film was wrong and should not have happened. There is no laser-thin line in the continuum of time that says: before this it is non-human, and beyond this line it is human. The forming of the quality of life that we call "human" may be seen as a continuum in itself that is in constant change that is not so much a linear flow of time and developement, but a holographic effect. And since we are dealing not only with obective science but also with subjective ethics here (subjective in that only homo sapiens gives a damn about this ethic'S statements and beyond him not one atom in the universe seems to care, no lower life form and not higher super intelliegence travelling the galaxy), we maybe should accept that this problem cannot be solved ultimately and in form of a generally valid blueprint that is true for every single case - we even already define right now very many exceptions from the so far valid rules, basing our assessment on crimes, health risks, social status etc.

In my earlier posting I called it a grey zone what separates the undefined featureless cellular mass from a biologic entitity that already can be understood as a human being in an early state. Potential alone - is not the same like it'S realisation. One needs to be aware of this fundamental difference. It wouldn't be a grey zone if we could exactly and precisely locate it in space and time, would it. Nevertheless acting as if this is possible, is more of relevance for the legal implications and the formulation of laws, than that it says anything about the reality of things. The law creates it's own reality, always, and by that just presents copies or images - never the original. One should not forget that.

Skybird - I THINK I understand what your saying - that some "mental capacity" does not imply humanity itself. I concur to a point - but there is a difference between "humanity" and life.

After all - a dog has mental capacity, but its a dog, not a human.
I can not disagree with this logic. However, there is a big difference between when does a mass of cells become "alive" as a multi system organism, vs when does a life become "human".

If you accept that the video you saw represented SOMETHING alive as a multisystem, fairly large organism - then that is sufficient in my eyes to say we shouldn't just be ok with "killing it" for convience sake. After all, going back to the earlier statement - a dog is still a dog - but we protect lesser LIFE FORMS. Kill a dog just "because" - and you have committed the crime of cruelty to animals. As a "higher" species (though that could be debated in some ways) - we have a moral and ethical duty to preserve and protect the life of lesser creatures.

Do we have a ethical duty to preserve the existence of a bunch of cells that have "potential'? If so, then every cell of every living thing should be protected. No more taking antibiotics for an infection if thats the case... Cancer treatments just went out the window too. But that isn't reasonable - so we have to draw a line. We destroy, just in the act of existence, billions of microscopic organisms every day. It is when those cells merge, become multifaceted in distinct ways - and quite literally - become more than the mere sum of their parts, but instead develop that symbiotic relationship within themselves that we recognize them as more than merely "cells".

Want to say a fetus isn't a human? Want to define it as something less than that? Ok. But it still demonstrates the criteria required to be classified as some type of animal life. Consider it like a catepillar - its one distinct form of recognized life. After its transformation - its recognized as another, totally different, form of life. Still - it is LIFE at that point. A zygote goes from being that "lump of cells" to which individual are doing their own thing, into a clearly defined set of systems that WORK together. This is the difference.

Once something becomes more than just cells, but a complex, growing, developing, self repairing and WORKING symbiotic system controlled autonomously by its own internal bioligical brain, what definition would you give it besides LIFE?

Once you define it as Life, the question of termination from that point forward is much easier answered.

The problem here with this definition or line of arguement, is there are those that want to avoid ANY limitation on abortion, just as there are those that want to avoid any abortion. Both are extremes. You won't ever get a rational view out of an extreme position.

This will be a quicky as I don't have the time right now to really address stuff.

One issue I have is the use of the term parasite. Technically speaking a late term fetus is more akin to being a true parasite then an early term one. Parasites are independent and functional entities that gain sustenance from a host organism. They are generally able to survive being outside a host for short periods of time before running out of resources (food, water, etc) necessary to survive. So as pregnancy continues the fetus shifts from being a collection of cells totally dependent on the mother, to a more truly parasitic form. This continues after birth though in a less direct way.

There is some other stuff but I'll get to it later.

That sounds like something from an Ayn Rand Novel. The one where noone had a name, just a number.

CaptainHaplo, I eat meat rarely, also fish, nevertheless I am confessing to be an omnivore - I know that for the fish or meat on my table, a lifeform was kiilled.

Vegetables also are "life". So is yoghurt. The difference may be in to what degree these lifes are aware of themselves, and to what degree they notice the event of their own dying.

The more aware of itself and of it'S death a lifeform is, the more hesitent we should be to take it'S life, i would say.

I am not sure you correctly got what I tried to say. I know I did it vaguely only, in an indirect, maybe even metaphporic approach, but even in German I would struggle to express precisely what I am after. but part of my point is that this strict criterion deciding what is human life and what not maybe cannot be had with this wanted precision. Grey zone, you remember.

I do not believe in gods, as you now. I also do not believe in individual souls, but i believe to have realsied that there is mind as a quality, in varying quantities, and that matter has the ability to organise itself, and the higher the compexity this organisation reaches, the more chance there is for self-awareness, for mind. the higher the complexity, the greater the quantity of mind (as a function), maybe. I do not rule out that mind not only should be defined as the result of cognitive processes in brains as we know then (it can even be argued that the existence of brains is a result of mind at work - buddhism would see it that way), but that maybe stellar structures and galactic systems form some kind of meta-organisms that in their way also form a kind of self-awareness, or mind, or life. the german title of a book that I rate very high over here, was given as "Eros, Kosmos, Logos" (the original title was "Sex, Ecology, Spirituality", it means the same, but the German title I find even better), and I tend to see live/cosmos very much like this: eros forms cosmos, cosmos forms logos. a hierarchical structuring, a process that has no beginning and no end, but just takes place and carries on. Evolution is a human conception, an attempt to apprach the questions of excistence in one possible systematic manner that promises best pragmatic benefit. While I see pragmatic value in Darwin'S theory, I am by far not as limited to this theory only as some people knowing I am atheist may assume. But if I stick to that for the moment, and would try to see one meaning and sense in life, and a reason for evolution, then it is that "what is" tries to become aware of itself to growing degrees, thus matter's tendency to form more and more complex hierarchial structures, superstructures, suprastructures, and so forth. Cosmos/creation tries to learn itself better and better, so to speak. This for me is the metaphysical dimension of what we call evolution. In other words, the purpose of life itself may be - self-realisation.

Again, this is only another approach to what I am after, maybe you find it helpful, or just confusing. But you see, what I want to say maybe cannot be said in words precisely, and words can only say what "it" is not.

And that's one of the tricky questions which must be answered before abortion can simply be called murder. If abortion were to be outlawed again, you know that those cases would start appearing in the courts. It would be easy to dismiss that argument as mere semantics, but it is also a very real posibility.

It's the woman's choice if you ask me.

hmm... seems alot of people look at abortion and think of religion... If the mother dosent want the kid, or is it could kill her to keep it, why dont let her have one...