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Old 09-28-2008, 09:23 AM   #7 (permalink)
Daniel_
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Location: Southern England
On a technical point, if it's a gun with a magazine, don't the bullets come out in the reverse order that you loaded them?

To look at the real question in the OP is "can we equate abortion of a foetus/baby with the shooting of an adult".

My own feeling is that a person is not truly a person until they are capable of an independent existence. This is a wishy washy answer, but equates to some point in the middle of a pregnancy when the foetus has developed sufficiently to survive outside the mother.

One thing that I find interesting in the American political situation is that people (such as McCain) feel comfortable saying a person is a person from the moment of conception, but nobody has enacted any laws to give a couple who have a very early miscarriage the same rights to time off for grieving and so on that you would gt if your one month old baby died.

In this country, a person is a person legally if they draw breath (I'm fairly sure that's still the law) so if you have a still birth, you are not given a birth certificate and no death is recorded, but if your baby is born and lives for 1 minute, you can register the birth and the death.

For all those who believe that "conception = independent personhood" (which is no more invalid than my "breathing = personhood", they are both pragmatic answers to the thorny issue of how can we mark the start of something that develops incrementally, and there is no RIGHT answer to that question); anyway - to those of you who so believe, how do you deal with statistics such as the one I was told at university that around 1/4 of all conceptions are naturally terminated by the body of the mother, failure to implant, some genetic abnormality that stops them growing at 16 cells, and so on?

I wonder if a better point to measure the start of a person might not be to look at cell differentiation - by the time it starts to grow bones and nerves the major hurdles are dealt with, biologically.
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