The immediate responses to my post are so perfectly Tunnels. I have fulfilled my defense requirement for snarkiness towards helpless children whose lives are ended against their will.
Perhaps I will return again one day to be misquoted, misinterpreted, misjudged, and mocked some more.
This is a discredit to you and your position.
Physiologically, a fertilized cell will eventually become a human, but legally and morally, I think there is a huge difference between a fertilized egg and a human. Since morning after is classified as an abortion, there is no heartbeat that is stopped or switching off a developing brain.
The dependence here is much more personal and physiological then most men care to admit. Any pregnancy carries some mortal risk to the woman carrying the baby to at least some extent not to mention other long term health risks/consequences. It can significantly impact their ability to function in society during the pregnancy and many women don't have the support system to allow them to do nothing for several months. If you are to consider any abortion murder, then shouldn't there be authoritarian control over the woman's actions during the pregnancy under the guise of child abuse? If the unborn child/fetus who is tethered to the life support host has the same rights as the host, then the actions of the host should be restricted. Its a slippery slope of moralizing that ultimately stems from a supernatural belief system.
Chris, I generally appreciate your posts on this forum, and think that you take unwarranted abuse from the left (which may be a dubious compliment given my own political leanings), but this response does little to nothing to answer my question. The vast majority of your second paragraph constitutes perfectly valid reasons in favor of abortion; I'm not Wrangor, and am not arguing that there aren't legitimate reasons to be pro-choice. I don't agree, but recognize that it's a difficult issue with rational viewpoints on both sides. However, those reasons have no relevance whatsoever in determining whether the unborn child is human or not.
Again, Christopher Hitchens is hardly known for his religious predilections, and he spells out the case clearly.
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But it’s only an evasion if we have some firm grounds for suspecting that the fetus is a human being.
True. But I think that by now we know where babies come from. And dialectics will tell you that you can’t be meaningfully inhuman unless you are actually or potentially human as well. Pointless to describe a rat or a snake, say, as behaving in an inhuman fashion. I put the question like this. You see a woman kicked in the stomach. Your instinct is properly one of revulsion. You learn that the woman is pregnant. Who will reply that this discovery does not multiply their revulsion? And who will say that this is only because it makes it worse for the woman? I don’t think this is just an instinctive or an emotional reaction (not that we should always distrust our instincts and emotions either). We are stuck with a basic reverence for life.
But aren’t all these notions of the sanctity of human life and so on alien to your otherwise Marxist view of the world?
On the contrary. As a materialist I hold that we don’t have bodies, we are bodies. And as an atheist I believe that we do not have the consolation of the afterlife. We have only one life to live, so it had better be good. All the nonsense we hear about mediate and immediate animation, the point where a soul enters the unborn and so on, is at best beside the point. It has in common with the sectarian feminist view a complete contempt for science and the theory of evolution—which establishes beyond reasonable doubt that life is a continuum that begins at conception because it can’t begin anywhere else.
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So even if the belief may have ultimately stemmed from a supernatural belief system, which assertion seems questionable at best, the same conclusion seems inescapable under physicalism.
The only thing you posted that, as far as I can see, even attempt to answer the question of what differentiates humans is "there is no heartbeat that is stopped or switching off a developing brain." As best as I can tell online, fetal heartbeats start at approximately 22 days. Fetal brain development begins around 16 days. Does that make a fetus human at that point?