Most Abortion is Murder

So to get bearings I'll just kind of summarize what it appears we are trying to do. We are trying to determine if an embryo is human life or not. I shall begin.---Definition 1:Defining life as something that "grows and changes" is kind of ambiguous. When life grows it has things to do with DNA and RNA, and building proteins. Rivers can grow in width and change direction. Rocks can grow as sediment gets layed down and change in composition. A mass of iron, carbon, oxygen, etc in space also conglomerates and "grows and changes". Dead whales build up a lot of gas and explode, which is a form "growing and changing" too. I wouldn't consider a star, rivers, sedimentary rock, or a dead whale to be alive yet they grow and change. Suffice it to say that life grows and changes in different ways that other things grow and change. So the word "grow" doesn't get at the core of the difference.Let's define A as the set of all things that grow and change, B as the set of all things that should be, or it doesn't matter if, they are murdered/disposed of/destroyed/have its process terminated. Define h as a healthy human, and w as a dead whale (which have reasons to be disposed of [1]) A = {w, h}B = {w}A*B = {w}I just used the example of a dead whale, I'm sure you can thing of many things that belong to set A*B. If it belongs to set A, then it can certainly belong to set B. I'm sure you can think of many things that belong to both sets. So saying that a fertilized egg belongs to set A, is not justification for saying that it should not be in set B. You need to define a third set, C which includes among other things humans and fetuses and zygotes, such that B*C = {}, the null set. And of course I do not believe there to be such a set.I don't think there is such a set because of the following: I would argue that a fully developed human is much more different than the sperm and egg cells that are produced and terminated by the millions in either a single man or woman. And if you are throwing out these cells by the millions, I don't think combining them makes them any more valuable. I think once the baby is born, it is obviously a wonderful and blessed thing which would be immoral to put in set B. But as for a few cells... I don't think individual cells are important. Neither does your body. Toss them in set B.---Definition 2:Call a living human E and a dead human D. Call the quality of being able to think "t". Call the quality of having a heartbeat "h". Both these qualities distinguish D from E. Call the set of qualities that distinguish D and E, set L for shorthand.So what we have is t, a quality that distinguishes E and D. Does anything that has quality t, belong in set B? Why you agreed yourself that war is not murder, and soldiers, call them S, have quality t, and belong in set B.So the takeaway from that is, even though something has a quality from set L, the presence of that quality in some object S does not mean that object S does not belong in set B. Here's my set notation so far:B = {w, S}S has quality tTo explicitly counter your argument with brevity, some things that aren't dead should be made dead, as we've proved (as long as you accept that soldiers should be killed or it doesn't matter if the are). To counter my argument here, you'd have to explain why we shouldn't kill soldiers, and why all things that have a quality from set L should not be killed... which is... hard to do.---Definition 3:That's a good definition for life, I like that one. But it's not the exclusive definition of "human life". The two are different concepts. I of course, being con, do not consider the early stages of a fetus to be human life. I'm sure we both don't consider sperm or egg cells to be human life, so this debate considers where we need to draw the line.---You said this, I should add:"I also acknowledge there are cases when intentionally ending another human life is not considered murder"Abortion is the termination of an unborn fetus, or whatever we defined it as above. Even if this fetus is considered "human life" as defined in this debate, ending human life isn't always murder, as you claim. So when IS ending human life, "murder"?So, to summarize, the resolution is "Most abortion is murder". Murder is killing something that has "human life". So this debate seems to resolve around whether you can prove that a fetus is that, and whether or not I can prove that it isn't that.Though, this statement you made: "I also acknowledge there are cases when intentionally ending another human life is not considered murder" REALLY REALLY complicates this debate. Because now we have to find a way to determine whether or not ending human life is actually murder or not, BEFORE we can even progress to arguing whether or not an embryo is a human life. Because if ending human life is not murder in some cases, then....What IS murder?[1]http://news.nationalpost.com...