It's about to hit the fan. (Page 3)

Here's another way of looking at Roe.

Pro-life advocates will often say this law isn't about abortion, but rather about state's rights, as posted earlier. IMO, that's a way to disguise the religiosity (a made-up word, I know) of wanting to overturn it. It's an intersting position to take, though.

Think about it. People likely to oppose Roe generally come from the same population as those who are actually the most ardent supporters of state's rights: conservatives who are likely to be against the federal government messing in their business.

But in this particular case, here is a Governor signing a law which he has said is a means for having a Federal Law allowing states to decide this particular issue for themselves, overturned.  Does that not make any sense?  Here a state is lobbying for their rights to be taken away.

So, if that deosn't make any sense, there must be another explanation. And in my opinion, it's that this governor feels that Federal legislation enforcing religious doctrine supercedes his state's rights to enact laws for themselves. And I think that's pretty scary.

As a corollary, what would happen if a governor passed a law banning citizen ownership of guns in his or her state, as a means for the second ammendmant to be overturned? Would that fly? Obviously not. So why does it fly in the case of abortion? it's simple. There's a not so subtle movement afoot in America to bring the Bible into law. This is just more evidence for it.

And it scares me, because I think this Court will overturn Roe.

Tyler, the arguement goes basically like this, and concerns the difference between a human being and a human person.

We are biologically human beings from the moment of conception, just as dogs are biologically dogs at conception and chickens are biologically chickens at conception/fertilization.

One way to test the general understanding of this by folks regarding non-human animals is to ask a non-vegan vegetarian if they would eat a fertilized egg. (again assuming that they eat unfertilized eggs) Most will not. Why? Because they recognize, correctly, that at fertilization that egg changes its nature and is now a chicken-in-the-fertilized-egg stage.

The same goes for human beings. We are biologically human from the moment of conception.

The question seems to have more to do with whether or not we are human persons at the moment of conception. A human person being someone, a human being, who posses certain rights.

The founders called these inalienable rights, including the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

They also belived that we were endowed with these rights. IOW, they are not human constructs but belong to us independent of our ability to invent them.

If you believe that we indeed do posses these rights, then regarding the abortion issue you need to show when we come into possession of these rights.

You would be right to say that we have no empirical evidence for when this happens. Some religions, such as Mormanism in my understanding, say that it happens when the embryo is emplanted in the mother's womb.

Many secular humanists will tend to say that it happens when a certain level of cognitive functioning happens.

In both cases there seems to be a point at which we go from not being a human person who posses inalienable rights to being a person and possessing these rights.

If this is the case, then in a pluralistic society you need to show precisely where this point is. It needs to be precise, because otherwise you risk sanctioning the killing of an innocent person, which being a person of good will you do not want to do.

Lacking empirical evidence to the contrary, there is no point on the continuum from conception to birth where you can safely say that before this point a human being is not a human person.

The only arguement you can make that a human being becomes a human person at some point after conception is a religious arguement.

That's what the Mormon arguement is, to my understanding.

I'll argue that this is also what the secular humanist arguement is. It is a religious arguement.

The only non-religious arguement that can be made is to say that a human being and a human person both start life at conception.

No, it's cause it would have bones and feathers and blood in it. Nasty.

I don't know any non-vegan vegetarians that make this distinction. Either they eat eggs or they don't, in my experience. 

I'd like to modify what I wrote and say, non-vegan vegetarians who do not eat animals out of a moral or ethical concern for the animal.  They tend to belive that humans do not have the right to eat animas, but may have the right to eat animal products such as milk and non-fertilized eggs.

There are plenty of folks like that in my neighborhood.  I bet there are a lot in PETA.  

Don, you present an interesting logical argument but there is a flaw.  Analyzing it purely as logic (if a then b type thinking) a leap is made when the secular argument is categorized as religious.  It's a small leap but significant.  I can understand why it is made, but a case can be made against it.  I hope someone in the medical field is following this and can help with terminology here, but let me provide an analogy to try to make my case.  I have celiac disease which can be tested for and clinically proven to exist or not in my system.  Other people have diseases or medical conditions that are not determined by a yes/no test.  They are only diagnosed by the existence of symptoms.  Colic in a child is one, right?  So it is commonly accepted and agreed upon by the medical community that when ____ set of conditions exist a patient is diagnosed with condition _________.  This decision is reached without a specific false/postivie test. 

Now, your argument assumes that since there is no yes/no test for when a human PERSON comes into existence it must be the same time that a human being comes into existence or else a party attempting to set a point in the timeline is making a religious argument. 

If secularists use the same process, deciding on a set of conditions that exist which demonstrate the condition of a human person existing, isn't that the same thing?  Now, I'm not trying to post WHEN that point exists.  People can argue about that until the cows come home (you use chickens, I use cows).  They are welcome to claim that it is at conception or anywhere along the time line after that.  I'm just trying to say that we accept that process for all kinds of decision making in other medical matters, why wouldn't it apply here? 

Tyler, this addresses the foundation that my arguement rests on. If you do not believe that we possess the right to life as Locke proposes, and Jefferson states in the Declaration of Independence, then indeed my argument does not wash.

Now if we don't possess these rights based in Natural Law, then we enter the interesting world that oneword seems to propose: one in which it would be morally justifiable to harvest the organs of an undesierable such as a criminal.

Or the world of Prof. Peter Singer of Princeton who advocates for infanticide in the case of children with certain birth defects.

While I oppose their ideas on these matters, I find their reasoning to be consistent.

Of course, it doesn't follow that if you reject Natural Law that you have to embrace policies like organ harvesting of criminals or infanticide. It's just that I don't see how you can argue against those policies on ethical or moral grounds.

John, I'm not saying that my arguement proves that human personhood begins at the same time as human beinghood, namely conception, only that you cannot show another point on the contiuum before which a human being is definitely not a human person.

A human being may indeed become a human person at implantation or when a certain cognitive function is reached. There is just no empirical evidence to prove it.

The only point at which you can be certain that before that point a human being is not a human person is the point of conception.

I don't think you can show empirically biological evidence that a human person exists. But again, as I said in my previous post, if you do not believe in a distinction between human beinghood and human personhood then you must be ready for the many possible outcomes that may flow from that position.

In the case of someone who accepts the distinction and tries to argue that the distinction is formed by cognitive functions, they will first have to show at what point and by what standard the cognitive development creates the change in a human's nature, and they will also need to show why that change is significant. The why of it will lead to questions which are religious in nature.

Don,

I agree.  My point is that your argument does not sufficiently prove  that empirically biological evidence (I'm not sure this phrase is correct but I think we know what we mean)  is needed for proof.  I know this sounds callous, but if you think of human personness (is this our word?  we have a word, that's cute) as a medical condition there is more than one way to determine the existence of a medical condition.

I would hope that our lawmakers would as well, but sadly many of them won't. 

Look at us.  We've covered abortion, states' rights, capital punishment and church v. state all in one thread.  And nobody has mentioned alpacas yet.

All very important and touchy topics that have been and will continue to be debated in this and other threads.

Except for alpacas.  Interest seems to have waned in alpacas. 

I can't change anyone's heart. I can't change laws. I can't talk a desperate woman out of an abortion. I can't convince a politician to go against the people who fund his campaigns. All I can do is treat people I meet with respect and allow them the dignity they deserve. Dealing with people one at a time - that's how I make sense of life.

Abortion will always be with us. We will always be an imperfect society. I don't know when an embryo or fetus becomes a "person" - I don't believe that anyone can answer this question with certainty. I can only make the best decisions for myself and take a loving-kindness attitude towards my fellow woman and man. If a woman choses to terminate an embryo, I will feel sadness for her but I don't feel entitled to make that decision for her. And I don't believe our government should make that decision, either.