Hard News: Medical Matters
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Lots of words there Peter, not a lot of content.
Scientific fact:
At conception a baby is alive.
At conception a baby is human.Seems to me the only reason one needs philosophy is to justify the killing of human beings.
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Sorry Grant, but at conception a baby (nice use of emotive language there), is only potentially human. If it can't survive without the mother, (and is not actually conscious), then it's not fully human yet.
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" in the hopes of encouraging more actively responsible attitude towards sexual intercourse." MT
This seems to be Marks real problem.Casual Sex. Jeez how boring do you want to make life?
"The reason why I get so impatient with this kind of false equivalence is that there is a very tiny group of affluent women who currently have reproductive rights."
Great great point, it took a long time to get here. ... and further who says Woman don't get their own gender specific rights ,especially when they literally carry a child for a significant part of their life, let alone the torments of emotion producing a child has for individuals, especially da ladies unless da Men are suffering silent unmentionable post natal depressions. The ladies get their own laws to do with their own bodies but the Men can write some "penis" laws if we so wish, well there's some in the old testament.
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Scientific fact:
At conception a baby is alive.
At conception a baby is human.I'm sorry, but that's patently absurd. If you're going to call the single cell produced by conception a "baby", you might as well call it an adult. Or an All Black, for that matter ...
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I have been staying right out of this because I'm just not interested in talking to trolls
but I do want to say to Anorak - I'm with you. Not somewhere I have been myself - but something I fully support you in doing.
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Grant Dexter emoted:
Scientific fact:
At conception a baby is alive.
At conception a baby is human.At conception you have a conceptus not a baby. A baby is a well developed foetus. Not even embryos are babies, they are embryos. We have these terms for a reason. Think about it a woman who discovers she is pregnant says: I am going to have a baby. IOW in the future, once it has developed and is born she will have a baby.
I have asked this question of many pro-lifers on the net and in real life without any decent answers: when during the process of fertilisation does the result become human? (setting aside that it takes a human egg and a human sperm to make a human conceptus).
Here is a non comprehensive list of processes within the process of fertilisation, which is a process not an event. Feel free to choose one of them, or suggest your own as to where the process has reached a definitive point where we have a human conceptus:
Assume sperm ejaculation at a time when the woman is fertile.
The sperm acrosome reacts
the sperm binds the zona pellucida
The sperm penetrates the zona pellucida
The sperm binds the egg (but see cortical reaction)
There is fusion between the egg outer membrane and the sperm head membrane
The egg begins the cortical reaction, which spreads out from the site of sperm binding blocking the binding of further sperm.
The injection of the male pronucleus
The completion of the acrosome reaction
The breakdown of the pronuclear membranes
The initiation of dna synthesis
The completion of dna synthesis
Chromosome formation
Chromosome counting (opportunity to bail out if polyspermy has occurred)
Chromosome alignment
Formation of the cleavage band
Chromosome separation
Cleavage completion (and hence the formation of a two cell embryo).Note that even then you do not have a definite future human. It has been calculated that probably 40% or so of human conceptions fail to implant (a whole new process). Etc, etc, etc.
Life is a cyclic continuum my friend, nature often does not have the joints we wish to carve her at. But for our delight, delectation and amusement please draw away. Feel free also to justify your choice.
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Ah, I see you do not like my terminology. I will concede the term baby is not what a medical practitioner might use if you will concede that baby is the term a mother might use.
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Wow. Peter. Lots more words. I'm impressed. I would say that a person forms at some stage between the first meeting of sperm and egg and first cell duplication. I don't know exactly where in that process.
Still the facts remain that at conception a baby is alive and human.
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@Anorak
Making abortion available on demand, with perhaps at least one mandatory chat with a counsellor, seems like a sensible way forward.
This is pretty much my view. Surgical abortion is not trivial, and it is an appropriate occasion for counselling, whether or not a woman changes her decision. But in the end, the state shouldn't force a woman into something as profound as pregnancy and that which lies after.
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Seriously, Grant, you'll have to define 'baby' for us. What is a baby to you? Is it a human cell? Is it sixteen human cells? Would a mother call a mass of human cells, indistinguishable from any other cells, a baby?
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Note that even then you do not have a definite future human. It has been calculated that probably 40% or so of human conceptions fail to implant (a whole new process). Etc, etc, etc.
Quite. And even when a foetus is miscarried, far, far beyond the stage of implantation, no one holds a funeral
You could say that a permanent holocaust afflicts most of the "babies" conceived. But that wouldn't make any sense.
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Baby? It's pretty simple really. Mothers have them. They grow into All Blacks sometimes.
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Mothers have babies. Nine months after conception.
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I think you guys are seriously ignorant of what happens in reality. Parents are destroyed by the loss of their baby and devastated by conditions that make conception so difficult. Do you honestly believe that the (lack of) ceremonies that mark the passing of the tiniest humans have any bearing on the facts?
The facts are that at conception (before implantation) a baby is human and alive.
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Davida - they sure do!
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Obviously the breakdown in communication here applies to what 'human' actually means. It could get tricky.
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Parents are destroyed by the loss of their baby
No. *Would-be* parents are upset by the loss of their *potential* baby.
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David - If it can't survive without the mother, (and is not actually conscious), then it's not fully human yet.
So close the neo-natal unit then eh?
Russell - I know a few who have held a small service to morn the loss in miscarriage, no death notice mind you.
A little more nuanced discussion might be helpful here.
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Shep - nice one, but obviously a baby in the neo-natal unit IS surviving without the mother, and is actually concious, (although not yet self-aware).
Do tell, though, whether you believe that the right to life begins at the moment of conception.
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David - I don't know.
I think we can do far better than we are in the care of kiddies & sole parents, thereby making it a dignified option, along with adoption than is currently being done. -
I agree, New Zealand could do much more for it's children and mothers. Unfortunately it seems that if you are a solo mother the very same people who were willing to go to extreme lengths to deny your choice of an early abortion are the very same people who believe that the DPB is an attack on the 'Family'. Oh the irony.
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I really do want to get away from blaming the women going to the clinics. That's not my aim at all.
Shaping a community where it is not needed because supports are in place, is my preffered option - Nanny State if you will.Craig was right - I wonder where the sane people are?
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Grant Dexter further emoted:
Wow. Peter. Lots more words. I'm impressed. I would say that a person forms at some stage between the first meeting of sperm and egg and first cell duplication. I don't know exactly where in that process.
Yet you claim it as a defining point. You cannot have it both ways, either it is a defining point in which case you have to define it, or it isn't.
Still the facts remain that at conception a baby is alive and human.
No the fact remains that at conception you have a conceptus, which is only alive if you use a narrow definition of the term. Put a conceptus in a dish by itself and it will not be alive very long. By your definition a virus is alive, so is a synethesised bacterial genome sitting in TE ph8.2 The concept you are studiously avoiding is the idea of the difference between the potential and the actual. You are conflating the two and you cannot do that. By your rubric the barely outlined novel in my head is already a best seller. Where are my royalties dammit?
Your continued conflation of actual babies with potential conceptuses is merely showing you up to being both blinkered and ignorant. I am trying to educate you, by all means change that to blinkered and wilfully ignorant...
BTW I have a PhD and many years lab experience in Developmental Biology including the making of transgenic mice by injecting dna constructs into the pronuclei of newly fertilised mouse eggs. It is a race to get them all done before that stage where the pronuclei membranes break down. You have to beware of eggs with three pronuclei, ones where the cortical reaction wasn't fast enough and two sperm bound and inserted their loads. Just one potentially fatal hurdle that emphasise strongly how very potential such things are.
You see I know, intimately what a conceptus looks like and it ain't like any baby I have ever seen unless it's some sort of microplankton. Blastocysts, the stage where you get Embryonic stem cells and the latest they can be cultured look like transparent footballs with a puddle in the bottom. They are exactly the same size as conceptuses, approx 0.1mm.
I have also studied and described a number of embryonic lethal genetic changes that stop development at stages where in humans most women would only be wondering if they might be pregnant. Embryonic life is a perilous process. That it works as often as it does and the vast majority of the failures go unnoticed does not change that. By pretending otherwise you are ignoring demostrable reality.
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Amazing, Peter. I've never seen that many words in one place before! Truly you are on a plane of your own!
I understand conception as a sequence of events that generates a human being. I haven't studied in a lab for endless hours as you have, but I do speak in nothing but facts when I say that at conception a baby is alive and human.
You seem to have some graded scale for life which is an interesting thing to have. Why would you need that? I see things and I think, "Rock. =not alive. Tree. =alive."
You seem to think that calling a baby at conception "alive" equates to believing a virus is "alive". They are both alive, you know? But why would you compare a baby with a virus? A baby isn't a virus, Mr. Smith!
You insist that removing a baby at conception from his mother will kill him. I agree.
You invent something called a "difference between the potential and the actual" and expect me to adhere to your standard. I don't. A baby is not potentially alive. He is alive. A baby is not potentially human. He is human.
You claim a PhD and years of experience looking at the process of conception yet insist that you cannot see humans at that stage. Why so blind?
The simple facts, regardless of your ability to reword meaning out of existence, remain. At conception a baby is alive. At conception a baby is human.
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Davida - Are you not able to tell the difference between a human and, say, a monkey? Or a virus! Can you tell the difference between a human and a virus?
I can. I guess if I worked as long as hard as Peter has I could determine a human conceptus from a mouse conceptus as well.
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