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Originally Posted by analog
Some would say that conception- the simple act of fertilizing an egg- is the beginning of life. They're basically saying that, from the onset, that tiny little bundle of replicating and dividing cells is a person. Scientifically, that's a ludicrous notion- just like when a person is declared clinically brain dead, they cease to be a live person.
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Scientifically, it's a tiny little bundle of replicating and dividing cells. That's what science tells us.
Your notion that it's absurd to label it a person is not scientific. It's philosophical at best and arbitrary at worst.
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Machines can maintain the biological processes of the body, such as respiration and circulation, so that the body can be harvested for organs- but the person is dead. An embryo without a brain, or brain activity, is no more a "living person" than a body with clinical brain death.
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You're free to believe that. Don't pretend it's scientific.
Every stage of the z/e/f is a stage of the human being. The z/e/f is clearly a human being
because of its potential to become what
looks like a human being. To become sentinent, to become autonomous. It owns that potential. Nothing but a human being can - it's fallacious to call it a "potential human being". A corpse lacks that potential.
As for your 'person' distinction: it all depends on how you define it. If you define it as a "living human being", then you're flat-out wrong - it is a person. If you add more to the definition, then you could be right. But at that point, I'm no longer interested in limiting the protection of the law to persons.
Your 'science' is nothing but semantics. Science cannot tell us what deserves protection.