Sweetleaf wrote:
chromanebula wrote:
androbot01 wrote:
USA Today: Pence vouches for Trump's anti-abortion viewsQuote:
“Let me assure you the Trump/Pence administration will stand for the sanctity of life and defend the unborn from the first day that we take office,” Indiana’s governor said in a speech at the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit. “I want to live to see the day that we put the sanctity of life back at the center of American law and we send Roe v. Wade to the ash heap of history.”
Why does an other's faith in the importance of human life Trump (intended) my right to the control of my physical experience?
Ding ding ding! You got it. You have the right to control your physical experience, but not anyone else's. While your baby might be inside your body, it is separate from it. Before birth we have our own DNA, body systems, heartbeat and (after a while) brain waves. Your rights over yourself are vast, but they end where mine begin.
You do realize it takes a long time for the fertilized egg to actually become a 'baby' correct? I certainly don't think you should be able to have an abortion like 1 week before birth as by then it is a baby just waiting to pop out, but yeah in the window of time before it actually develops into a baby its not a person...its bunch of cells, genetic and biological material that is not self aware.
The problem with development theory is that it's unclear where the line is. If you draw the line at the first heartbeat, then we don't have a duty to revive people who have gone into cardiac arrest, because they're not alive. If you draw it at the first brain waves, that makes coma patients not alive. If you draw it at viability, then the line is being pushed back all the time because of medical advances, so it's pretty meaningless. If you avoid that problem by drawing it at viability *without assistance*, then newborns do not have a right to life, because they depend on their mothers for warmth and breast milk. And we all know that it's wrong to kill newborns.
Drawing the line at whether the baby is "self aware" is even worse, because we aren't self aware until 18 months of age:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/great-kids-great-parents/201211/self-awareness. Again, we don't go around killing infants and young toddlers, because we all intuitively understand it to be wrong.
My point is that development into a newborn is a process, not a one-time event. It's impossible to draw a line during that development because it's a continuous process. Conception, on the other hand, is a clear, one-time event that changes the essence of what is. Two--sperm and egg--become one. Nonviable becomes viable (as in able to grow and develop). A unique human organism is created. It has its own DNA, not the mother's or father's alone (as a tumor would). This is why the scientific study of embryology says that life begins at conception. If a human life is present, we have no right to kill it.