Eturnalshift wrote:
Dek, you raise an interesting point.
Religion aside... you say a child isn't complete until it is born and the tie is severed. Is a child complete if it goes the full 40-week term and is then birthed? What if the child is born a month early? Developmentally, it's less complete than the full-term child. Now, what if the baby was born nine weeks early? Is it more complete than a child who has been in the womb for 39 weeks just because the cord has been severed? The reason I ask this is because a child, in the womb or out, is dependent on the mother (or someone). If it's OK to kill a child in the womb because it's dependent on the mother than, by that logic, shouldn't it be OK to kill a child months after it was born because it's still dependent and couldn't survive without help? What about retards or the handicapped by birth - they're often dependent on others and, in many ways, developmentally incomplete. Should their parents get to terminate them as well?
If we can agree that it's wrong to kill a post-birth baby, a small child, a teen ager or an adult then why is it OK to kill an unborn child? Because it's unborn? Because you don't see it? Because it's smaller than a baby, but a baby is smaller than an adult? Because it's convenient when you accidentally knock up some chick you were banging?
that's just the point though.
state a: it is a collection of cells from the parents
state b: it is a human being
if there were a definitive point in time where a baby crosses between state a and state b, then there would be no question. but there isn't.
you can only clearly define the ends. it is most definitely just cells while the sperm are still in the testes and the egg is in ovaries or uterus. and it is most definitely a human being when it is born, separated from the womb, and able to breathe and generally exist on its own.
anywhere between those points is up to interpretation. i have no qualms with your belief of where that line is between the two states, no matter where you would place it.
what criteria do you use? biological development? what is the point at which it is a child and not an internal puddle of slime (which it basically is at conception)? when it gets a heartbeat? at the moment the sperm touches the egg? when it grows arms and legs? when it develops a gender? when it develops a brain?
surely you would come up with an answer to that question, but to ponder the question is hopefully to realize that your answer is probably not what someone else would come up with, and that you have no ironclad reason to choose that particular point in development except for what you felt was right.
and then think how you would feel being held by the old testament example. think about how you would feel for it to be a mortal sin to masturbate because you are wasting potential human life. and realize that it isn't ok to hold someone else to your beliefs that they do not share.
Akina: bitch I will stab you in the face
