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holy shit! there's a whole page here my browser didn't pull up the first time. fuck, i'll have to read a bit to get back into it: for now will, i was responding to this:
"a human being is alive if they are in a state where they can metabolize, reproduce, grow, and respond to stimuli"
now, quickly i italicized the first part because that would seem to be begging the question. so, in my words, i would substitute the 'human being' in that phrase with 'human flesh' or the like. the point is, that a tumor can do all those things. with test tube babies, and genetic engineering on the march - how long is it until we can extract ye olde double helix out of any part of the body and make it grow? will that be less of a human? i don't want to sidetrack into cloning and such - but to me a fetus certainly has the potential to support life. but many things have the potential for life: sperm, eggs, and eventually other parts of the body as well, i hypothesize.
ergo, i think of a fetus as a highly specialized organ in the human body...but i do not see that it can be proven to be a separate human being until birth. but then i'm getting to be repeating my previous argument.
il: we got along just fine without them for sixty years...first, no we didn't. different procedures, but i'm pretty sure that cultures have found ways of inducing stillborn children / miscarriages for a long time. women have aborted their children using less surgical techniques. i think what you mean is that our society hasn't overtly condoned them until recently, and even that is widely varied. see this thread for a microcosmic example of that dissent. taken out of the ethical realm you are claiming regardless abortions as 'right' or 'wrong,' your statement would seem to me to basically say 'we done fine so far with x, why can't we keep doing x?' which is essentially denying progress, or change if you prefer.
therefore, we are back at the discussion of ethics. not of any sort of 'back in the good old days' discussion. i think.
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