Stop&think

If you want a debate then bring it all on but do not bother to bore us with your own semantic interlude directed at attacking me.

Start by challenging my argument on why you should not interfere in the sovereign decisions of others and why other people should not be allowed to interfere in your sovereign decisions.

In short, I suggest you dispense with your “trite emotions” and utilize some “rational reasons”.

The outcome may be less “emotively colourful” but it will be more “argumentatively substantial”

I look forward to your response but somehow think you lack the metal to score any real points

Interesting.

A completely hypocritical post from Col Rouge. Read my post again and find where I attacked you and point it out. Then read your post and see how you attacked me. That is, if we take the Dictionary.com definition of attack as "to begin hostilities against.."

I was simply arguing the point that despite what a dictionary says, there are human actions that are always categorised as killing, whether or not we decide to name them murder, abotion, termination, cessation of pregnancy etc.

Be careful about "the sovereign" decisions of others. The state has always interfered in the sovereign decisions of others when those decisions have led to actions that deprive others of that very sovereignty.

It's funny that you say I am emotional - I suppose because I used exclamation marks. I haven't used them here, and I have made sure I am "argumentatively substantial". People on my side of the argument are normally accused of being too unemotive, while those who support 'pro-choice' stances are carried away by the emotions of a difficult moral conundrum.

But lets get to the point - this will always come down to an argument about whether those 'others' I mentioned before are really human beings. I think they are, you don't, and that's the argument. Scientists and doctors know when life begins and so do many of us, but the truth is just too hard to face. Abortion is a sad reality, I just wish those who support it would accept that they are allowing themselves to compromise on this moral issue.

P.S. The most annoying argument for me on your side of the debate is the one that says "Well every sperm and ova that die off is the killing of a life." These people need a good lesson in logic and common sense, or a brief course in causailty. Without each other, neither will ever become a human life; a soon as they are joined, human life is inevitable. Every time. Why is this so hard to see? Now that is certianly a case of emotion clouding someone's thoughts.

stop and think, it seems that you miss the point. Murder applies to
people, killing applies to anything. We kill trees and lettuces,
for your benefit. We kill all sorts of things every day, just for
you, if you don't do it yourself.

Murder applies to people and a zygote is not a person.

Why you draw your little moral line in the sand at zygotes, is
yet to be explained, apart from usually religous reasons.

Yabby, if you read my post above, you wont find a religious point of view at all.

You are right - I should have been more specific. The killing of a person is always wrong (I just assumed that understanding). I agree with your distinctions.

But once again, the argument, as I said above, comes down to what you and I classify as a 'person'. There are some ethicists (Peter Singer for example) that consider consciousness or consciousness of self as a necessary condition for personhood. That is why he ranks some animals higher in the personhood hierarchy than young babies.

But don't you see that I am not drawing a "little moral line"? I am making a very black and white statement: when a sperm fertilises an ovum there is a radical change that occurs. Either gamete on their own would never become human, but as soon as they join, there is an unbroken unity: a human being, that will never become any other type of being, such as, let's say, a pig, or a horse, or a flower...or a lettuce.

Indeed, it is those who disagree with the above that draw a "little moral line" because they all choose a certain stage in the development of the child (most likely a comfortable time, like late-term, or even birth) at which they say the human is now a person. That is what I call drawing a line, and as I said, there are many lines drawn at different stages.

Some say development of the brain, some say development of all vital organs, others, when the foetus starts to finally look like a person. Singer says self-consciousness, so that might be at 3 or 4 years old.

I don't draw a line- like many others, I say when the most important event occurs: fertilisation. If it doesn't happen, a human person will never result. If it happens, a human person will always be the result.

Doesn't this make sense?

Again, no hint of religion here.

"If it happens, a human person will always be the result."

Absolutaly not, its a long way from a zygote to a person.
So your argument does not make sense and is simply one of
semantics.

I think that there are enough definitions of words around,
so that we can clarify their meaning.

A zygote is a human organism, its not yet a person. A
potential person perhaps, but it carries human dna,
just like sperms and ova. Big deal, lots of cells carry
dna. We kill them all the time when we graze our knee
or whatever.

There is alot of semantic rhetoric used by right to lifers,
like "unborn child". If its not yet born, then its not
a child.

If it hasn't got a human brain, how can it be a person?

Of course we draw moral lines in the sand, for morality
is a subjective question. There is no such thing as
objective morality, just lots of subjective opinions.

We get back to the original point. Murder applies to
people, killing to everything else. We kill things
every day. So what

What it comes down to is it's very important for some people to kill their offspring. Just like some animals do. I think it's a shocking thing to do but, for those who must, it probably is better for everyone in the long run. Finding the excuse to do so should be 'slightly' more difficult than the excuse to not have taken contraceptive measures. Still as a human being, I don't think it ought to be encouraged and the abortion laws are sufficient to the task as they stand. The high price is already being paid at around 100,000 per year.