On 17 Sep 2000 21:49:28 -0700 Phil Osborn <philosborn@altavista.com>
writes:
> >But.... There isn't any "child" at the point of conception.
> There's just
> >an embryo
From: Zero Powers (zero_powers@hotmail.com):
> There's no "certainty" to it at all. What you have stated is nothing
> more
> than your own personal and arbitrary belief.
Phil Osborn <philosborn@altavista.com> writes:
> We KNOW that an embryo is not a human being,
Phil, I think you're not distinguishing between the idea of being
genetically human & the idea of being a member of a community entitled to
culturally granted rights. The attempt to find some naturally occurring
fixed point at which an immature human is transformed into a full member
of the community seems similar to the attempt to define "natural" rights.
The concepts turn out not to be very useful in practice and require the
supposition of a god who endows the individual with natural rights and
breathes a soul into the fetus or embryo or newborn (whichever happens to
be the transformation point for the particular culture).
Culturally granted rights and duties must be thought about and determined
by at lest some members of each culture. It's true that most people
don't give much thought to these ideas but instead accept them as given
and have difficulty imagining any other way of life. Nevertheless, at
some point in time, someone or ones DID think about these things and
make decisions.
If you use intelligence as a measure of humanness (which you seem to be
doing, Phil), then you're faced with the burden of not granting rights to
anyone who doesn't measure up. I think such a definition might allow for
infanticide since, even if newborn babies are very intelligent, they
don't have any way to communicate that fact-- they can't talk or focus
their eyes very well or ever hold up their heads. Pretty much all they
can do is eat, puke, piss, and shit. They're very cute, though,
especially when they see you and break into a big, glowing smile.
Actually, I think cuteness may have a lot to do with most people's idea
of when a fetus becomes a person. If you look at the antiabortion web
sites, you see lots of photos of nearly full-term fetuses thrown into
garbage bags or chopped up into pieces. These get to you a lot more than
photos of human embryos that look like pigs with gills. I think if a
person wanted to "get away with" cloning humans, they'd want to alter the
genetic makeup to the extent of giving the creature a hideous appearance,
a face and form that not even a mother could love. A gargoyle.
Barbara
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