tisonlyi

'your', 'my' and 'its'.

The possession of a living body requires a sufficiently complex sentience to make the assertion.

There is no sentience in a cluster of cells 2 weeks post-fertilization.

There is no sentience, even to a level of animal sentience (ie. the sensations of pleasure and pain), in a 23 week old foetus. The creatures that emerge from extreme premature births back that up.

A cell is not sentient.
A cluster of cells is not sentient.
A cluster of nerve cells is not sentient.
A somewhat organised collection of nerve cells is still nowhere near complex enogh to make the assertion.

Sentience (subjective consciousness) of a certain critical mass begets sapience (subjective consciousness with wisdom/judgement/aware self-directed purpose/etc).

If you're concerned with the treatment of Homo Sapiens from fertilization, then surely you will accept that an abundance of extremely complex nerves are required to even start on the path up from pre-sentience, through sentience and up to sapience and membership of the Homo Sapiens club? Until there's a point of rudimentary sentience, there is no independent entity there. The host has 100% rights.

If you don't accept that, you're making extreme suggestions as to how we should treat an enormous swathe of animals in the extreme lower orders and perhaps even parasites and diseases...

If you claim that there's something special about the DNA of our species, then you're making privilege assertions for molecules... Which is... interesting. (implications for the sentience of organs in transplants, etc.)

Some of this might seem extreme and even ridiculous, but if you want to push assertions of possession in a materialist manner back even to pre-embryonic stages, then you've charged through a range of credulous levels.

Basically, it seems to me, you're trying to materially rationalise the imparting of a soul upon conception. Be honest about that if you are, but there's no point in trying to look at cell development at 2 weeks post-fertilization or assertions about sentience in that endeavour.

I prefer my arguments to remain wholly and entirely in the known Universe.

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Also, late term abortions being illegal does not, in no way whatsoever, mean they available on demand without regulation - despite what certain extremists might tell you.

(The Dr who was killed recently was widely denounced in extreme media with regard to supplyinglate term abortion on dubious grounds, which the man was 100% cleared of. Late term abortions from this man were not 'on demand'.)

Outside survivability is an issue, clearly, because if 100% of foetuses at 21 weeks could survive with reasonable outcomes, then there would be no justifiable position to abort rather than remove from the womb and gestate outside the womb. I should hope you'd be in favour of delivery rather than termination, right?

If there is no possibility of the foetus at a particular point developing into a functioning human being, has no sentience let alone sapience and is utterly unwanted, then please justify its rights over the mother and its difference from a parasite?

DNA is not an answer.

If men carried children, abortion pills would be available in supermarkets.

__________________
"I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." - Winston Churchill, 1937 --{ORLY?}--