Abortion

Con has made statements that include a variety of background assumptions, and I intend to examine each of them in detail. My second-round post will be a continuation of this one. I enumerate the assumptions below: 1. An unborn human is "innocent". 2. An unborn human qualifies as a "being", in the same way that the average walking human qualifies as a "being" (while, say, the average hopping rabbit doesn't, because we never say "rabbit being" in casual conversation). 3. An unborn human qualifies as a "baby". 4. An unborn human qualifies as a "child". 5. A woman is not allowed to control access to her body. 6. God exists. 7. God created humans, or, our bodies are gifts from God (equivalent assumptions). 8. It is wrong to mutilate oneself. It is to be noted that words are powerful, and "propaganda" is the art of mis-using them in a way that seems sensible. Let me begin, therefore, with the most-obvious of the mis-used words above. 3. When a pregnant woman proudly states, "I'm going to have a baby!", she is using the future tense. She never says, in reference to that pregnancy, "I have a baby right now!" Therefore it is logically obvious that her pregnancy involves something other than the typical concept of what a "baby" really is. Well, we know quite thoroughly what happens during a pregnancy: A living human organism is building itself, using the equivalent of "blueprints" encoded in DNA. Scientists call that organism various names depending on its development stage: A) "Zygote" --this is what exists immediately after conception, when an ovum and a sperm merge (also known as "fertilization"). B) "Blastocyst" --this emerges from the fertilized egg after four or five days of cell-divisions. htt.....ww.wonderquest.com/TwinsTrigger.htm (NOTE: I modify web addresses to avoid being damaged by the debate.org software. Copy it to a blank browser page address bar and replace the initial dots with standard characters like "p://w".) C) "Embryo" --this is what it is called after successfully implanting in a womb. This is the actual beginning of a pregnancy, not conception --because many blastocysts fail to implant, and hormones associated with pregnancy don't get produced until after implantation occurs. When less precision is warranted, "embryo" can encompass both the blastocyst and zygote stages. D) "Fetus" --its name for most of a pregnancy. The dividing line is a bit fuzzy, but typically an embryo can be called a fetus 8 weeks after conception. Note that this is long enough to encompass 2 normal menstrual cycles. One might say that a fetus is an embryo that has successfully stayed implanted in a womb (because many just-naturally don't, and menstruation occurs either on-schedule or late). A Debate is supposed to be about facts and logic, not emotion. If it seems impossible to emotionlessly use the word "baby" when talking about unborn humans in a Debate, then, logically, one shouldn't do that. Let's consider an analogy regarding the sentence, "I'm building a boat!" At what point will the builder say, "I have a boat!"? The answer, very probably, "when it is ready to be launched", not before. So, if birth can be analogous to launching a boat, then it can be logical to call an unborn human a baby when labor begins, but not days or weeks or months before labor begins. Because labor is very much the process of launching a baby, which is typically ready to be launched, into the outside world. (Note that before modern medical technology came along to help, most prematurely-born babies would instead qualify as "miscarriages".) 4. The next word Con mis-used is "child". There is actually a better basis for using it than "baby", since pregnancy is sometimes described as "being with child". However, this falls into the category of "counting one's chickens before they have hatched". Many pregnancies end in miscarriage and emotional suffering --yet much of that suffering can often be avoided. The way to avoid suffering is to avoid something known as "setting oneself up for a fall". It is basically unwise to assume that a given pregnancy will result in a live birth. A pregnancy is actually a "child (or baby) under construction". So focus on that until a child is delivered! That construction process is known to be extremely complex. Have you never heard of "Murphy's Law", regarding complex events??? htt.....ww.murphys-laws.com/ So, "hope for the best, but prepare for the worst." Mentally prepare oneself, that is. Else one may experience the equivalent of "mental mutilation" if the construction project fails. 2. The last mis-used word is "being". When humans talk about themselves in casual conversation, sometimes they simply say "humans" and sometimes they say "human beings". Occasionally the phrase "human animal" will be used, but this is almost always derogatory. The main non-derogatory use is in zoology, where human animals are dispassionately compared to other animals in terms of physiology, behavior, etc. There is a lot of commonality among them. htt.../en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Ape_(book) Next, when humans talk about almost any other living thing in casual conversation, they almost never append the word "being". They never say "rabbit being" or "radish being" or "paramecium being". The exceptions appear in the literature of science fiction, where you can find lots of "extraterrestrial beings" and "alien beings" and "intelligent beings". Logically, it appears that the word "being" has a special meaning in casual conversation: It is a synonym for "person". After all, rabbits are not considered to be persons, while alien beings are very often described as equivalent in many ways to human persons. It is now obvious why anti-abortion propaganda calls unborn humans "human beings". They want you to think that unborn humans qualify as persons, without actually proving that unborn humans qualify as persons. But do unborn humans, at any stage of pregnancy, exhibit any of the characteristics that could nonprejudicially distinguish alien persons/beings from mere animals? No! Therefore, logically, unborn humans qualify as "human animals" in the purely zoological sense, and don't qualify as anything more than that --certainly not "persons" or "beings". It must be noted that the word "being" has more than one definition. One of them is "something that exists". Any human could qualify as a "human being" by that definition, including a corpse. However, it would be illogical to state that an unborn human is a person simply because it exists and "being" has multiple meanings. The proof of that illogic should be obvious: "A radish exists exists; therefore it qualifies as a 'radish being'. Since 'being' also means person, a radish must therefore be a person." That really is Bad Logic; it can't apply to unborn humans! And since human animals can't be murdered, Con's argument fails. I'll close this post by examining the "God" assumptions: 6. Since Murphy's Law obviously affects pregnancies far more than God does, the existence of God may be irrelevant for this Debate. For more details, see the next paragraphs. 7. The main problem with claims such as "God created humans" is that they are claims made by humans. And it is widely known that humans can lie to achieve a reward. The many claims that preachers made, thousands of years ago, have rewarded preachers ever since. What actually matters are the things that can be proved to be true. So far, all the evidence favors Evolution as the origin of humanity, not God. Since there is no verifiable evidence (to say nothing of "proof") that "our bodies are gifts from God", it logically follows that any statements depending on such a claim can be ignored until evidence or proof is offered. (to be continued)