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

Since modern embryology and biology tell us that every new distinct human being begins its life as a fertilized egg, we must therefore conclude that abortion is not morally permissible as it terminates the life of human beings.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. Both the sleeping me and the fetus has the potential capacity to gain sentience (I can by waking up and the fetus can by developing it), so there is no moral difference between the two.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. And I still haven’t been given a good definition of what sentience is. Is it the ability to have abstract thoughts, the ability to remember and have hopes, ideals? What is 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. Saying that a zygote is just organic matter is a euphemism for the sole purpose of distorting the reality of the situation.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. Well, a newborn baby has no sentiece and thoughts either. It can’t even recognize its parents for the first few weeks, it’s a being of instinct - tabula rasa. It certainly reacts to stimuli, but so does every other living organism.This still puts is miles ahead of a zygote. Secondly, brain activity may have absolutely no bearing on sentience and thoughts.Your jargon threw me for a loop; how exactly can one think without a brain? Now you have set a very dangerous precedent. If I am killed under anesthesia, I feel no pain. Since I’m incapable of feeling any pain, emotional or physical, can I be harmed? If I’m painlessly killed, then by your definition, I am not harmed.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. And yes, by the definitions and arguments I’ve gotten - there really is no difference.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 definition for what sentience is in the human sense nor have my arguments been given any attention. They have just been brazenly dismissed without any good justificationWelcome 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?