by ookdatnog | 2025-08-01 21:07:14+00:00
> I think there's a clear biological difference between an entity receiving nutrition, and 2 entities, each with half of a set of DNA, coming together to make a single entity with a full set of DNA.

The difference is "clear" to you because you are reasoning backwards from a desired conclusion. You want to claim that the zygote is a person and the unfertilized egg is not, so of course the merger of DNA is the "clear" boundary between entities to you.

But this boundary just doesn't work very well. To begin with you ignored the "child with deadly mutation" challenge I presented: the only way the child reaches adulthood is if we modify its genes, which you seem to imply makes it a different entity.

And if we dig a bit deeper, the criterion by which you disqualify the unfertilized egg from being considered human also disqualifies the fertilized egg. It too is an entity which can meld with other entities to form a single entity (chimerism, as we discussed), and it can even do the opposite: identical twins start as one zygote that splits at a later point in its development.

I'm not sure even adult humans would qualify for being human in your worldview, come to think of it. Some people have had their brain halves separated during their lifetime, and this seems to lead to two separate persons locked in one body, at least in some cases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain).

At this point, you can start overfitting your definition to draw an absurdly jagged boundary exactly around these counterexamples, but at that point I'd appreciate if you just admit that personhood starting at fertilization is just an axiom for you and everything else follows from it.

> What you're saying seems to be that it's ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the state, but not ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the people in the state.

That is very much not what I am saying, but I wasn't very explicit about the point I was making, so I shall clarify.

Two people can disagree about what they think the law should say, but one thing that all decent people would agree on, is that the law should be consistent. We want it to apply evenly to all, without strange exceptions. We don't want any laws that say "everyone is free, except people born in May, they have to do slave labor in the mines."

I was not making an argument about what the law should be, I was arguing that abortion laws make the law inconsistent, as there is no other case where the state violates the bodily autonomy of one person to force them to care for another. For example, if we are in a remote area and I get badly injured, and you are the only person with a compatible blood type nearby, the state can't force you to donate your blood to me.

My point was that it's inconsistent to say that the state can violate one person's bodily autonomy to keep another alive specifically in the case of pregnancy. If you want to make this consistent, you need to allow the state to do this in all cases, implying among other things forced blood transfusions and forced kidney donations. Perhaps you agree that the state should be able to force people to donate blood or a kidney, and in that case your opinion is consistent.

I wasn't expressing agreement or disagreement with the draft. I was stating that it is irrelevant as a counterexample. That's because the justification for the draft rests on a moral principle that's distinct from the one that justifies abortion laws (ie "citizens' bodily autonomy can be violated to defend the state" vs "citizens' bodily autonomy can be violated to save any individual's life"). Again, I deliberately offer no opinion on whether the draft is justified; for my purposes it's enough to show that it is not relevant as a counterexample.