Abortion

My post here begins by continuing the examining of Con's statements in her Round-4 post. "Yes, an unborn human ... is innocent" "My mother ... would say that she was going to have a baby .... I know that she and [others] ... [are] using it as a figure of speech." "If a women says it meaning it literally then she is wrong." "An unborn baby is not a construction project, so that analogy is a bad one." "God is who grants us our personhood status at conception." "... I already said the baby is NOT assaulting the mother." "It is wrong for a women to use birth control." "What makes someone a person is having an eternal soul, which the unborn do." "God does not need a creator because He had no beginning." Con wrote the preceding quoted remarks (some from Round 5) without offering any supporting evidence whatsoever. Why should anyone believe mere claims, if they lack supporting evidence? "Just because they have been told to believe it since birth?" Sorry, but that qualifies more as "brainwashing" than "education". "No the suffering is caused by the knowledge the that she is pregnant with a baby, and the baby died." This is very much like what I previously described --she believed she had something that she did not actually have: a complete baby (which qualifies as "mis-using the English language). When the construction project failed to reach completion, the death of that incomplete baby-under-construction proved that her belief was not founded on Reality; she "set herself up for an emotional fall" by believing something that was not Truth/Knowledge. Thank you, Con, for helping me make my case! "... see yourself in a mirror is NOT a person defining characteristic." I actually specified recognizing oneself in a mirror, which is a different thing than merely "seeing yourself". Most ordinary animals with sight will fail that self-recognition test, and all sighted person-class organisms will pass that test. The fact that we know that blind persons can exist merely means that this test, by itself, is insufficient to prove some random organism is a person. Meanwhile, it can still prove that various non-blind organisms are not person-class. Including human infants (and, by extension, all unborn humans). "[If a woman has sex] she is still inviting the baby in whether she wants to or not [and she must not abort it]." This is analogous to saying, "If you walk near a swamp, you are inviting mosquitoes to bite, whether you want it or not, and you must not swat them when they do bite. It is analogous to saying, "If you move to a desert, you are inviting crop failure from lack of rain, whether you want it or not, and you must not build an irrigation system." It is analogous to saying, "If you move near a river, you are inviting a flood into your house, whether you want it or not, and you must not build a levy." ALL those statements are utter nonsense! Persons have Free Will. They are not required to go through life as if they didn't have it! It is very true that various actions can have unwanted consequences. But it is Free Will that gives us a chance to do something about those consequences. Including seeking abortions that will kill unwanted human animals. "... piercing your ears does not usually cause harm." That is false. It always involves damaging the body. Yes, the damage is minor. But damage is damage! And, since there is no "just" cause for it, it qualifies as "mutilation", per Con's own definition. Con ignored the second definition of "assault" at: htt.../dictionary.reference.com/browse/assault 2. Law . an unlawful physical attack upon another; an attempt or offer to do violence to another, with or without battery, as by holding a stone or club in a threatening manner. I added the emphasis above. The "physical attack" part does not have to be violent. It merely has to be unlawful. Stealing someone else's blood is definitely unlawful! So, a mosquito can indeed commit assault. And so can an unborn human. "... vampires cannot be used to argue for abortion." I was comparing types of assault, and showed that unborn humans are worse than the type of assault typically associated with fictional vampires. A vampire assault is described as being basically like a mosquito assault, only thirstier (just like unborn humans are mostly blood-thirstier than mosquitoes). But unborn humans not only suck blood, they also poison it with biowaste and push possibly-addictive drugs into it. If one ordinary human adult did such things to another, no matter how gently, it would be classified as "assault"! "... the mother is almost never harmed by the baby." That is false; psychological harm happens to most mothers --all who experience postpartum depression. "A human being does have value simply because someone wants him/her." This is not always true; otherwise no abortions would ever be sought. And God loves souls much more than mere animal bodies. Think about the Biblical Flood. To whatever extent it may have happened (and been exaggerated), no souls were hurt in the process! "That computer would not be a person. Just being intelligent does not make something a person." Con ignored what I previously wrote: "... we will be able to copy every aspect of the human mind, that qualifies us as a person, into a computer." --"every" means "more than just/only intelligence". So, Con is ignoring the facts --even her own "facts". For example, if a dolphin has a soul, it would qualify as a person. Proving it does or doesn't have a soul is as difficult as proving an unborn human does or doesn't have a soul. We know nothing about the range of physical bodies, which God might consider to be suitable vehicles for souls! This could indeed include dolphins and complex-enough computers/robots --and may exclude not-complex-enough unborn humans-under-construction. We will be building complex-enough computers/robots in probably-less than 20 years (assuming our technical civilization doesn't collapse before then). An additional fact, not previously mentioned in this Debate, concerns "nanotechnology". We have discovered that molecular biology basically is nanotechnology. htt.....ww.economicexpert.com/a/Bionanotechnology.htm Molecular biology just happens to be Natural instead of man-made nanotech. And that means the human body and brain are just as much machines as future robots and computers will be. The behind-the-scenes hardware can differ, but it is irrelevant if the patterns of operation are the same. So, if our machinery can host souls (and if dolphin or other non-human biomachinery can host souls), so can, eventually, man-made computer machinery. The key question is "WHEN do souls become associated with bodies?" There are only claims that unborn humans have souls; there is no actual supporting evidence whatsoever. Yes, the same is true about the average human walking about --lots of claims and almost no hard evidence. The only even-partly-"hard" evidence for the existence of human souls comes from "reincarnation" researchers. htt.....ww.afterlife101.com/Twenty_Cases.html But this poses a problem for Con's case: In reincarnation philosophy, souls only enter babies after birth; unborn humans have no souls! (By the way, abortion doesn't matter; immortal souls can afford to wait, to incarnate into babies born to mothers that want them!) Of course, Con might choose to ignore even that small amount of data, and thereby return to spouting totally-worthless-because-unsupported claims about unborn humans and souls. In overview, it seems that Con's entire case consists of almost nothing but unsupported claims. Tsk, tsk. Meanwhile, I've presented a great deal of evidence that almost all of those claims are flawed!