Debate: Abortion is a selfish action to alleviate an undesirable consequence
Side: True

So basically you want to give the full rights of a human being to something that is not yet a human being because it will one day become a human being. Probably. So why not let 6 year olds buy whiskey? Why wait until they are 21? After all, they will be 21 eventually. Probably. In fact, every corpse starts it's existence as a human being; why not treat all human beings like corpses, since they will become corpses eventually anyways? Simply put, because we have to treat things as they are, not based on what they will maybe become.-----------------No, a zygote is actually a human being. From the moment of conception, all of your distinct features have already been determined - your height, eyecolor, sex, susceptibility to diseases etc. A fertilized egg is already a human being by the virtue of belonging to the Homo Sapien species. This argument that a fertilized egg is not a human being is completely out-dated and is based of pseudo-science.:::::"Embryo: An organism in the earliest stage of development; in a man, from the time of conception to the end of the second month in the uterus."[Dox, Ida G. et al. The Harper Collins Illustrated Medical Dictionary. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993, p. 146]"The development of a human begins with fertilization, a process by which the spermatozoon from the male and the oocyte from the female unite to give rise to a new organism, the zygote."[Sadler, T.W. Langman's Medical Embryology. 7th edition. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins 1995, p. 3]"Almost all higher animals start their lives from a single cell, the fertilized ovum (zygote)... The time of fertilization represents the starting point in the life history, or ontogeny, of the individual."[Carlson, Bruce M. Patten's Foundations of Embryology. 6th edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996, p. 3]"[A]nimal biologists use the term embryo to describe the single cell stage, the two-cell stage, and all subsequent stages up until a time when recognizable humanlike limbs and facial features begin to appear between six to eight weeks after fertilization...."[A] number of specialists working in the field of human reproduction have suggested that we stop using the word embryo to describe the developing entity that exists for the first two weeks after fertilization. In its place, they proposed the term pre-embryo...."I'll let you in on a secret. The term pre-embryo has been embraced wholeheartedly by IVF practitioners for reasons that are political, not scientific. The new term is used to provide the illusion that there is something profoundly different between what we nonmedical biologists still call a six-day-old embryo and what we and everyone else call a sixteen-day-old embryo."The term pre-embryo is useful in the political arena -- where decisions are made about whether to allow early embryo (now called pre-embryo) experimentation -- as well as in the confines of a doctor's office, where it can be used to allay moral concerns that might be expressed by IVF patients. 'Don't worry,' a doctor might say, 'it's only pre-embryos that we're manipulating or freezing. They won't turn into real human embryos until after we've put them back into your body.'"[Silver, Lee M. Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World. New York: Avon Books, 1997, p. 39]::::::::::::::Secondly, I have never argued that fetuses should have a right to life because they will eventually become humans. I have argued that they have always been human beings from conception. Your argument about corpses and age-requirements are moot because they criticize an argument that exists only in your head. I won’t defend arguments I have never erected. And the reason we don’t give 6 year olds whiskey is because their mental faculties have not developed enough to understand the ramifications of alchohol to their well being. To understand, they need parental guidance and care and time to grow.If we treat people as they are, then certainly we must treat a fetus as a human being - because a human is what it is, not some appendage to be removed. ---------------Yeah when what it takes to make you sentient is a shake on the shoulder, and what it takes to make a fertilized egg sentient is 9 months of it growing a brain, among other things, I don't put those two on the same level of sentience. You might be not utilizing your sentience when you sleep, but you can wake up literally at any given point and be sentient. A zygote doesn't have any sentience to utilize. It would need a brain first.--------------You are missing the point. In both cases there is no sentience to speak of. We both have the potential capacity to gain sentience, either by waking up or by reaching the required stage of developement. The difference is simply time and time is arbitrary.Think of it this way, a patient is in a coma and has no sentience but the doctors say that there’s a good chance that in 9 months he will recover. It would be absurd to pull the plug on him if he might get better after 9 months. Even more absurd would be to say that he is no longer a human because he lacks sentience and isn’t utilizing his capacity for sentience.-----------So you can find more examples of humans that don't fit my description of sentience and suggest we kill them, as well? No thanks. I don't see why it matters. When you're looking at something that literally only contains 2 cells, obviously that isn't sentient. That's about as far as it need to be defined.------------Yes, sentience needs to be defined because we have to determine whether newborn children, sleeping people and people with mental disorders can be considered sentient.Your unwillingness to define sentience shows that either you don’t know it yourself or you just don’t care or that you are simply dishonest. Sentience, to you, means whatever it needs to mean in the context of abortions, as long as it fits your ends. It’s a blanket statement - you haven’t really said and explained anything if you don’t define sentience.-----------Not really. I'm simply trying to point out that I don't think that a grown human being and an almost invisible to the naked eye lump of bloody cells are the same thing, just because the latter might become the former. I don't think it's possible to "murder" something that is essentially a blood clot.-----------Again, science doesn’t really care what you think. A zygote, fetus, baby, infant, adult - they are all human beings at a certain stage of development. I don’t know why you resist this point so much, but just open any random contemporary embryology textbook and see for yourself. And don’t come talking to me about sentience until you give me a definition of sentience. It’s like if a victim in court wants justice and the judge says: ‘’Well, I don’t think defining Justice is important. Justice is just Justice.’’---------This still puts is miles ahead of a zygote.-------And miles behind an infant and an adult human being.--------Your jargon threw me for a loop; how exactly can one think without a brain?---------They can’t. But what you can’t understand is that your brain doesn’t simply give the human a mind. It also controls muscle movement, heartbeats, breathing, seeing etc. The brainactivity you see in fetuses may have nothing to do with sentience - these brainwaves may just be somatic impulses that regulate heartbeats for example. Your brain does a whole lot more than just let you think.--------Well... yes... no shit. If you don't feel pain it's impossible to be harmed. I don't know about emotional harm, but luckily that doesn't factor into this debate at all anyways because zygotes and eggs don't have emotions.--------Well, I guess we’ve reached an agreement here. Since you implied that killing fetuses is okay because they cannot be harmed due to their inability to feel pain - you must therefore agree that it’s okay to painlessly kill adult human beings. As long as they don’t feel pain, it is okay.Answer my question then. If I shoot Whitaker while he is sleeping - did I harm him? You have to deny harm if you are intellectually consistent with your reasoning.----------I know you're dissatisfied with our arguments and you disregard them out of hand, but that wasn't what I was asking. You, personally, see no difference between yourself and a miniscule lump of cells that lacks a brain, a heart, fingers, eyes, lungs, sentience, thoughts, consciousness, emotions, and, well, just about everything else? Jesus, man, have some self respect; if you were that undeveloped you wouldn't be able to formulate ideas, much less type them on a computer. You're trying to argue that the chicken and the egg are the same thing. They're not. They have obviously different physical properties, and if you try to make a chicken omelet or try to get an egg to eat feed out of a trough you will encounter substantial difficulty.I have not gotten a defini------------Human rights dictate that every human beings has a right to life regardless of their health, intelligence, race, capability, productiveness etc.While I may be more developed than a fetus, we are both human beings. That is the whole point of human rights - rights that we have solely by virtue of being a human being.--------------Welcome to CreateDebate.No, seriously though, whining about it won't do you any good. Complaining about the reception of your arguments is pointless; suggesting that all the disputes you've gotten are actually attempts to ignore your points for no reason is actually kind of insulting, not to mention annoying. You don't think I feel I haven't gotten good justification from you for you're points? If I did, I wouldn't be debating you, would I?-------------How can my disputes be insulting. You yourself admitted that you are not interested in giving a concrete definition for sentience, so my point remains. How can we speak of sentience, if we don’t even know what sentience means?You can’t throw out a bunch of definitions and criterions and think that you can get away with not explaining them.