Roe v Wade is on deck

[Toni]

You think “life begins at conception and ends at death”

I do.

You do? The sperm is alive, the egg is alive. Where is this new life beginning?

I’m still waiting for @TomC to tell me what he means by conception..

 

[TomC]

You do? The sperm is alive, the egg is alive. Where is this new life beginning?

I’m still waiting for @TomC to tell me what he means by conception..

Since I'm not a pedantic biologist, I'm confident that it would be better if you explain your meaning. I have good reason to believe that posting what I've known since grade school would send you dodging down some semantic rabbit hole.
Again.

Please don't take the condecension personally. You quoted a post where I was asked to explain the difference between "alive" and "a life".
Seriously.

I find this conversation very much like discussing the history of life on earth with a YEC. With blinders firmly in place, they often cannot distinguish between the ancient word "kind" and the more modern word "species". They'll look right at the fossilized remains of shallow sea creatures, embedded in limestone at 10,000' elevation, and explain it away. "The devil put them there to lead Believers away from The One True God".

Sorry if you find the comparison with religious ideologues insulting, but that how this conversation often feels to me.
Tom

 

[Rhea]

You find the conversation pedantic and stifling.
Imagine how the woman forced to give birth feels about stifling pedantics.


It’s interesting to see you complain that a **conversation** is unpleasant.
Imagine having **conversations** be the worst of your troubles on this topic.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I find this conversation very much like discussing the history of life on earth with a YEC. With blinders firmly in place, they often cannot distinguish between the ancient word "kind" and the more modern word "species". They'll look right at the fossilized remains of shallow sea creatures, embedded in limestone at 10,000' elevation, and explain it away. "The devil put them there to lead Believers away from The One True God".

Sorry if you find the comparison with religious ideologues insulting, but that how this conversation often feels to me.
Tom

It must be real trying for you. I can only imagine what it is like, and that it is much worse than a two month pregnant 19 year old being told by someone that they have to carry a pregnancy to term because they personally feel the rights of said fetus overrule any rights of the 19 year old teen.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You think “life begins at conception and ends at death”

I do.

You do? The sperm is alive, the egg is alive. Where is this new life beginning?

Yup. Life began something like 4 billion years ago. There is no "new" life.

 

[Toni]

You do? The sperm is alive, the egg is alive. Where is this new life beginning?

I’m still waiting for @TomC to tell me what he means by conception..

Since I'm not a pedantic biologist, I'm confident that it would be better if you explain your meaning. I have good reason to believe that posting what I've known since grade school would send you dodging down some semantic rabbit hole.
Again.

Please don't take the condecension personally. You quoted a post where I was asked to explain the difference between "alive" and "a life".
Seriously.

I find this conversation very much like discussing the history of life on earth with a YEC. With blinders firmly in place, they often cannot distinguish between the ancient word "kind" and the more modern word "species". They'll look right at the fossilized remains of shallow sea creatures, embedded in limestone at 10,000' elevation, and explain it away. "The devil put them there to lead Believers away from The One True God".

Sorry if you find the comparison with religious ideologues insulting, but that how this conversation often feels to me.
Tom

Definitions are not semantics. Wanting to understand what someone means when they use a term is not pedantry. It’s wanting to understand what someone means when they use a term. In this thread, and in virtually all other discussion and debate about abortion, people use terms that have very specific meaning in very incorrect ways. It matters very much because some people would ban hormonal birth control as ‘abortion’ because some birth control does not prevent ovulation or fertilization but do prevent implantation. Some people equate a fertilized egg with a human being.

Determining the parameters under which a woman is allowed to make her own medical decisions is often defined by particular parameters; was she raped? Is her life or health at significant risk? Those two parameters alone are rife with potential to interpret what rape means and does it need to be reported, a rape kit performed, an arrest made and so on; what constitutes ‘significant threat’ abd is mental health included?

Roe v Wade hinges on balancing the right to privacy with the viability of a fetus.

I have no idea what you learned in grade school. My grade school education included virtually zero science, period. Kudos to your school system if you learned about human biology and human reproduction in grade school but that would be very unusual. Especially since you reduce biology to pedantry.

You’ve called me out as being ‘emotional’ because I want people to actually know what terms mean. It seems your personal dislike of me is clouding your reasoning.

 

[Toni]

You do? The sperm is alive, the egg is alive. Where is this new life beginning?

I’m still waiting for @TomC to tell me what he means by conception..

Since I'm not a pedantic biologist, I'm confident that it would be better if you explain your meaning. I have good reason to believe that posting what I've known since grade school would send you dodging down some semantic rabbit hole.
Again.

Please don't take the condecension personally. You quoted a post where I was asked to explain the difference between "alive" and "a life".
Seriously.

I find this conversation very much like discussing the history of life on earth with a YEC. With blinders firmly in place, they often cannot distinguish between the ancient word "kind" and the more modern word "species". They'll look right at the fossilized remains of shallow sea creatures, embedded in limestone at 10,000' elevation, and explain it away. "The devil put them there to lead Believers away from The One True God".

Sorry if you find the comparison with religious ideologues insulting, but that how this conversation often feels to me.
Tom

Your refusal to say what you mean by conception is duly noted.

As well as the bizarre logic that seems to equate biology with creationism.

 

[TomC]

You do? The sperm is alive, the egg is alive. Where is this new life beginning?

Yup. Life began something like 4 billion years ago. There is no "new" life.

A life started in early January, 1958. I know because it was mine. I was born in late summer. I didn't exist billions of years ago, even if you can't understand that.
Tom

 

[Elixir]

Are you under the illusion that you have made some? Anyone who explicitly or implicitly claims a human zygote or blastula is a human being to argue against abortion is either a functional idiot or a religious zealot.

There you are, another lib'rul thinking in binary terms, as if those characteristics were mutually exclusive! More often than not, they go together.
Add in their gullibility, the ease with which they are convinced that any clump of human cells is a "human being", and it's a wonder that they can tie their own shoes (if indeed they do).
There just might be a special hell for those hypocrites who cut their fingernails or hair...

 

[Trausti]

You do? The sperm is alive, the egg is alive. Where is this new life beginning?

I’m still waiting for @TomC to tell me what he means by conception..

Since I'm not a pedantic biologist, I'm confident that it would be better if you explain your meaning. I have good reason to believe that posting what I've known since grade school would send you dodging down some semantic rabbit hole.
Again.

Please don't take the condecension personally. You quoted a post where I was asked to explain the difference between "alive" and "a life".
Seriously.

I find this conversation very much like discussing the history of life on earth with a YEC. With blinders firmly in place, they often cannot distinguish between the ancient word "kind" and the more modern word "species". They'll look right at the fossilized remains of shallow sea creatures, embedded in limestone at 10,000' elevation, and explain it away. "The devil put them there to lead Believers away from The One True God".

Sorry if you find the comparison with religious ideologues insulting, but that how this conversation often feels to me.
Tom

Your comparison to the YEC crowd is not off the mark. If NASA discovered an organism with a tiny fraction of the complexity of zygote it'd be the discovery of the century. But because we're talking about human life here, basic facts must be ignored.

 

[Toni]

Since I'm not a pedantic biologist, I'm confident that it would be better if you explain your meaning. I have good reason to believe that posting what I've known since grade school would send you dodging down some semantic rabbit hole.
Again.

Please don't take the condecension personally. You quoted a post where I was asked to explain the difference between "alive" and "a life".
Seriously.

I find this conversation very much like discussing the history of life on earth with a YEC. With blinders firmly in place, they often cannot distinguish between the ancient word "kind" and the more modern word "species". They'll look right at the fossilized remains of shallow sea creatures, embedded in limestone at 10,000' elevation, and explain it away. "The devil put them there to lead Believers away from The One True God".

Sorry if you find the comparison with religious ideologues insulting, but that how this conversation often feels to me.
Tom

Your comparison to the YEC crowd is not off the mark. If NASA discovered an organism with a tiny fraction of the complexity of zygote it'd be the discovery of the century. But because we're talking about human life here, basic facts must be ignored.

WOW.

Yes, if NASA discovered a new organism, presumably not on this planet, it would be pretty big news.

As it is, I don't think you understand what a zygote is or how complex it is or is not.

And that is not the real issue. The real issue is that you would consider that zygote to be more important than the woman whose body it was living in.

 

[untermensche]

Here's the compromise.

People opposed to abortion will never be forced to get one.

 

[laughing dog]

Since I'm not a pedantic biologist, I'm confident that it would be better if you explain your meaning. I have good reason to believe that posting what I've known since grade school would send you dodging down some semantic rabbit hole.
Again.

Please don't take the condecension personally. You quoted a post where I was asked to explain the difference between "alive" and "a life".
Seriously.

I find this conversation very much like discussing the history of life on earth with a YEC. With blinders firmly in place, they often cannot distinguish between the ancient word "kind" and the more modern word "species". They'll look right at the fossilized remains of shallow sea creatures, embedded in limestone at 10,000' elevation, and explain it away. "The devil put them there to lead Believers away from The One True God".

Sorry if you find the comparison with religious ideologues insulting, but that how this conversation often feels to me.
Tom

Your comparison to the YEC crowd is not off the mark. If NASA discovered an organism with a tiny fraction of the complexity of zygote it'd be the discovery of the century. But because we're talking about human life here, basic facts must be ignored.

That one broke every irony meter. A zygote is not a person - that is a basic fact.

 

[Bomb#20]

Yup. Life began something like 4 billion years ago. There is no "new" life.

A life started in early January, 1958. I know because it was mine. I was born in late summer. I didn't exist billions of years ago, even if you can't understand that.

Granted you didn't exist a billion years ago. So how do you know the life started in early January, 1958? You don't have any memories that far back. You were unconscious for the early part of your life. For all you know by personal experience, maybe your life started in May 1958, or July 1933, or whenever. You're just taking somebody's word for it that you can tell when a life started by subtracting nine months from the birth date. So whoever's word you're taking, how do you know that person knew what he or she was talking about?

How old was your mother when you were born? Women don't generate ova all life long, the way men generate sperm -- it all happened in your grandmother's uterus. Your mother was born with all the ova she would ever have, including the one that turned into you. So if she was 25 when you were born, then the TomC ovum formed around 1933. What happened in 1958 was that an already living ovum absorbed some nucleic acid from a sperm. The ovum outweighed the sperm by about the same factor as I outweighed the Pfizer nucleic acid vaccine I absorbed last spring.

So why is it any more reasonable to say your life began in 1958 rather than 1933, than it would be to say my life began when I got the Covid vaccine rather than back in the 60s?

 

[Rhea]

As it is, I don't think you understand what a zygote is or how complex it is or is not.

And that is not the real issue. The real issue is that you would consider that zygote to be more important than the woman whose body it was living in.

That is why they try to change the subject. So that they can pedantically and circularly argue something with lots of meanings and jump from pne to the other when they are shown to be wrong, instead of the obvious argument, which they cannot refute.

You never ever have to give a reason for why you refuse to donate blood, bone marrow, portions of your liver, or upon your death any other portion of your body. You’re not even required to give a reason for why you won’t help someone up off the floor. You are not required to justify your refusal to make your body parts available to any one else, even if you are the cause for them needing your body parts (e.g. drunk driver causing accident that requires such a donation to live). The zygote is not MORE important than the woman carrying it such that it gets to subjugate her agains her will and use her blood, marrow, and organs to sustain itself.

A woman does not lose her rights to bodily autonomy because some other body wants to use it.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You do? The sperm is alive, the egg is alive. Where is this new life beginning?

Yup. Life began something like 4 billion years ago. There is no "new" life.

A life started in early January, 1958. I know because it was mine. I was born in late summer. I didn't exist billions of years ago, even if you can't understand that.
Tom

You are one collection of life, not life as such. All life on Earth traces an unbroken lineage back 4 billion years. There have been great modifications over those eons, but while there probably has been other life that arose on Earth none of it is around today.

 

[Jarhyn]

A life started in early January, 1958. I know because it was mine. I was born in late summer. I didn't exist billions of years ago, even if you can't understand that.
Tom

You are one collection of life, not life as such. All life on Earth traces an unbroken lineage back 4 billion years. There have been great modifications over those eons, but while there probably has been other life that arose on Earth none of it is around today.

I was waiting for someone to go there. I'd put together a few "life started 4 billion years ago" posts too but none seemed to really get off the ground.

But yeah. I am not going to belabor my points that I think that the reasons we ought not kill arise from investment of intent and fostering an unambiguity of ethical will so as to prevent hastiness and so to prevent irrevocable bad decisions.

I wonder if Tom understands that in the way he didn't exist 4 billion years ago, he also didn't exist 4 picoseconds ago.

He didn't not exist. All of his existence was getting ready to be him then, same as it was getting ready to be him 4 picoseconds ago, and then it became the him of now.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Since I'm not a pedantic biologist, I'm confident that it would be better if you explain your meaning. I have good reason to believe that posting what I've known since grade school would send you dodging down some semantic rabbit hole.
Again.

Please don't take the condecension personally. You quoted a post where I was asked to explain the difference between "alive" and "a life".
Seriously.

I find this conversation very much like discussing the history of life on earth with a YEC. With blinders firmly in place, they often cannot distinguish between the ancient word "kind" and the more modern word "species". They'll look right at the fossilized remains of shallow sea creatures, embedded in limestone at 10,000' elevation, and explain it away. "The devil put them there to lead Believers away from The One True God".

Sorry if you find the comparison with religious ideologues insulting, but that how this conversation often feels to me.
Tom

Your comparison to the YEC crowd is not off the mark. If NASA discovered an organism with a tiny fraction of the complexity of zygote it'd be the discovery of the century. But because we're talking about human life here, basic facts must be ignored.

I can only imagine how important this zygote would be if they could form in human males.

 

[TomC]

I wonder if Tom understands that in the way he didn't exist 4 billion years ago, he also didn't exist 4 picoseconds ago.

He didn't not exist. All of his existence was getting ready to be him then, same as it was getting ready to be him 4 picoseconds ago, and then it became the him of now.

I'm glad you mentioned this. It's important.

The value of a human individual is not their past. It's their potential in the future. All the stuff that individual might think, do, feel, whatever. It's all about human potential.

People draw arbitrary lines in human development. From implantation, to heartbeat, the brain activity, to birth. But those are all arbitrary divisions between the value of the human at the moment and the human potential of the individual. The potential of a healthy 20 something is more obvious, and actualizing their potential less of a burden on others. But it's the same basic thing, choosing death for one is destroying their potential not their history.

I appreciate your help explaining this.
Tom

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I wonder if Tom understands that in the way he didn't exist 4 billion years ago, he also didn't exist 4 picoseconds ago.

He didn't not exist. All of his existence was getting ready to be him then, same as it was getting ready to be him 4 picoseconds ago, and then it became the him of now.

I'm glad you mentioned this. It's important.

The value of a human individual is not their past. It's their potential in the future. All the stuff that individual might think, do, feel, whatever. It's all about human potential.

People draw arbitrary lines in human development. From implantation, to heartbeat, the brain activity, to birth. But those are all arbitrary divisions between the value of the human at the moment and the human potential of the individual. The potential of a healthy 20 something is more obvious, and actualizing their potential less of a burden on others. But it's the same basic thing, choosing death for one is destroying their potential not their history.

I appreciate your help explaining this.
Tom

So you are against the daily birth control pill then?