Lamborghini costs an arm and a leg :(

[Tigranes]

I don't think we can really say that "biology is crystal clear" that any unique organisms exist. That is a philosophical question in itself, not answered by simple observation or experimentation.



As has been mentioned too, the idea of becoming a unique organism upon conception raises problems as to whether identical twins are the same organism.

I am getting tired of this twin argument, which is more relevant for stem cell destruction debate and not in the case of abortion, when both babies already look like small humans and not like cells. But for clarity's sake let's consider this once and for all:

About one-third of all twins are monozygotic, or "identical." This means they begin as a single zygote but divide into two zygotes somewhere between 3-6 days after conception. In extremely rare instances, this division can occur as late as 12 days from conception.1 Biologists don't know exactly how or why this happens, and unlike fraternal (dizygotic) twinning, monozygotic twinning does not seem to be influenced by heredity or environment. How does this phenomena relate to abortion? Some argue that because one human zygote has the capacity to become two (or more) human zygotes, that is evidence that individual human life does not begin at conception.

Before considering such a claim, it should be pointed out that surgical and medical abortions are both performed well after the zygotic stage of pregnancy has ended. So if you're going to argue that human zygotes should not be recognized as persons until after the capacity for twinning has ceased, be aware that this argument does nothing to justify abortion in the mainstream. Where it does come into play is in the joint arenas of birth control, embryonic stem cell research, and in vitro fertilization. All three interact with the human embryo during the zygotic stage. Specifically, certain birth control methods can destroy an already conceived human embryo by preventing implantation. Embryonic stem cell research relies on extracting embryonic stem cells that can only be obtained by destroying a human embryo, and it is commonplace for "extra" human embryos to be discarded during in vitro fertilization.

The question then is this. Does the existence of monozygotic twinning prove that the human embryos being destroyed during the zygotic stage are not actually persons? To help answer that question, there are a number of things to consider:

There is overwhelming, biological consensus that individual, human life begins at conception. It is the only definitive starting point in human development—with the possible exception of the splitting that occurs during monozygotic twinning itself.
Parthenogenesis is not a process by which one organism becomes two. It is a process by which one organism produces another. If this is indeed the process by which monozygotic twinning takes place, there is a very real sense in which one twin is "parenting" the other.
If you understand monozygotic twinning to be a form of parthenogenesis, it is reasonable to conclude that the life of one twin began at conception while the other's began at the point of division.
In the broader realm of cloning, the production of a second, genetically-identical clone does not mean the original being ceases to exist or never existed at all.
The process of twinning does not appear to alter the essential character of the zygote that existed before the twinning occurred. Where there had only been one "body," cleavage yields two.
The process of human reproduction is itself a remarkable example of how one body can give rise to a separate, morally-significant, genetically-distinct, second body—without ever ceasing to exist itself. Conceiving and giving birth doesn't mean the woman wasn't already human before the process took place. Nor does anyone suggest that she has somehow become two people. Her body has simply produced another body.
Science can tell us when individual, biological life begins. It cannot tell us when "personhood" begins or "ensoulment" takes place.
Since there is no way to distinguish between zygotes that will divide into monozygotic twins and those that won't, and since the division can occur anywhere within a nine-day range, the existence of monozygotic twinning does not provide an observable line of demarcation whereby an embryo definitively moves from being a human non-person to being a human person.
The attempt to make a distinction between human beings and human persons has never turned out well. The most ethically-safe criteria is to regard all living human-beings as persons under the law.
Philosophically, the reality of monozygotic twinning does raise some perplexing questions. But from a biological standpoint, not much changes. Even if you want to use monozygotic twinning to argue against the existence of "personal" human life prior to day twelve, does it really make sense to argue that so long as one human being can become two human beings, we should be allowed to destroy the one before that can happen? Shouldn't the human embryo's remarkable capacity to reproduce itself secure it more protection instead of less?

 

[Tigranes]

I don't think we can really say that "biology is crystal clear" that any unique organisms exist. That is a philosophical question in itself, not answered by simple observation or experimentation.

Every new life begins at conception. This is an irrefutable fact of biology. It is true for animals and true for humans. When considered alongside the law of biogenesis—that every species reproduces after its own kind—we can draw only one conclusion in regard to abortion. No matter what the circumstances of conception, no matter how far along in the pregnancy, abortion always ends the life of an individual human being. Every honest abortion advocate concedes this simple fact. Do you understand?

Faye Wattleton, the longest reigning president of the largest abortion provider in the United States—Planned Parenthood—argued as far back as 1997 that everyone already knows that abortion kills. She proclaims the following in an interview with Ms. Magazine:

I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don't know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus.

On the other side of the pond, Ann Furedi, the chief executive of the largest independent abortion provider in the UK, said this in a 2008 debate:

We can accept that the embryo is a living thing in the fact that it has a beating heart, that it has its own genetic system within it. It’s clearly human in the sense that it’s not a gerbil, and we can recognize that it is human life.

Naomi Wolf, a prominent feminist author and abortion supporter, makes a similar concession when she writes:

Clinging to a rhetoric about abortion in which there is no life and no death, we entangle our beliefs in a series of self-delusions, fibs and evasions. And we risk becoming precisely what our critics charge us with being: callous, selfish and casually destructive men and women who share a cheapened view of human life...we need to contextualize the fight to defend abortion rights within a moral framework that admits that the death of a fetus is a real death.

David Boonin, in his book, A Defense of Abortion, makes this startling admission:

In the top drawer of my desk, I keep [a picture of my son]. This picture was taken on September 7, 1993, 24 weeks before he was born. The sonogram image is murky, but it reveals clear enough a small head tilted back slightly, and an arm raised up and bent, with the hand pointing back toward the face and the thumb extended out toward the mouth. There is no doubt in my mind that this picture, too, shows [my son] at a very early stage in his physical development. And there is no question that the position I defend in this book entails that it would have been morally permissible to end his life at this point.

Peter Singer, contemporary philosopher and public abortion advocate, joins the chorus in his book, Practical Ethics. He writes:

It is possible to give ‘human being’ a precise meaning. We can use it as equivalent to ‘member of the species Homo sapiens’. Whether a being is a member of a given species is something that can be determined scientifically, by an examination of the nature of the chromosomes in the cells of living organisms. In this sense there is no doubt that from the first moments of its existence an embryo conceived from human sperm and eggs is a human being.

Bernard Nathanson co-founded one of the most influential abortion advocacy groups in the world (NARAL) and once served as medical director for the largest abortion clinic in America. In 1974, he wrote an article for the New England Journal of Medicine in which he states, "There is no longer serious doubt in my mind that human life exists within the womb from the very onset of pregnancy..." Some years later, he would reiterate:

There is simply no doubt that even the early embryo is a human being. All its genetic coding and all its features are indisputably human. As to being, there is no doubt that it exists, is alive, is self-directed, and is not the the same being as the mother–and is therefore a unified whole.

Don't miss the significance of these acknowledgements. Prominent defenders of abortion rights publicly admit that abortion kills human beings. They are not saying that abortion is morally defensible because it doesn't kill a distinct human entity. They are admitting that abortion does kill a distinct human entity, but argue it is morally defensible anyway. There is simply no debate among honest, informed people that abortion kills distinctly human beings.

 

[onejayhawk]

Even so, they were still trying to shut down an organisation based upon faulty, edited videos.

This part of your problem. There is practically no way to structure this statement as accurately reflecting reality.

They are not trying to shut down Planned Parenthood because of the videos. They were trying to shut down Planned Parenthood a decade ago.

The current push is to strip federal funding and force PP to operate as what it has always claimed to be--a non-profit organization.

It does no good to argue that defunding is tantamount to shutting down. PP's opponents have never had federal funding. Were they shut down?

The videos are what they are. They are edited for impact and to make a specific point, but they cannot be discredited completely. There is substance.

J

 

[useless]

The videos are misleading, they can be discredited based upon the facts i posted earlier.

 

[Formaldehyde]

The videos are what they are. They are edited for impact and to make a specific point, but they cannot be discredited completely. There is substance.

What "substance" is that? That facts simply aren't important to so many authoritarian conservatives? That they prefer nonsensical propaganda to the truth?

They have indeed been "discredited completely". The only people not willing to accept that are those who are too emotionally invested in this latest reactionary Christian witch hunt.

 

[useless]

The videos claim PP is selling organs of fetuses for profit but even those involved in the field agree that PP would make next to no profit selling said organs/tissue, but not only that the comments were taken out of context, which you would know if you watched the full, unedited video.

Another strike against this video is that it was made by the same people who pulled the acorn video scam.

 

[Formaldehyde]

It is an obvious scam that can only fool those who are readily willing to be fooled yet again.


Link to video.

The only "profit" in stem cells is being made by a single company that no longer even gets them from PP due to all this hysterical nonsense.

 

[onejayhawk]

The videos are misleading, they can be discredited based upon the facts i posted earlier.

It is an obvious scam that can only fool those who are readily willing to be fooled yet again.

Misleading I will give you. Fabricated or worthless? Neither of those.

J

 

[useless]

They're worthless given the supposed claim that PP is selling fetal tissue/organs for a profit, which they are not, so there is no scandal, the video-makers lied.

 

[aelf]

Peter Singer, contemporary philosopher and public abortion advocate, joins the chorus in his book, Practical Ethics.

Funny that you should bring up Peter Singer. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see how a moral philosopher who focuses on suffering as the key determinant of moral and immoral acts could be opposed to the destruction of bio-organisms with no capacity for suffering.

 

[onejayhawk]

They're worthless given the supposed claim that PP is selling fetal tissue/organs for a profit, which they are not, so there is no scandal, the video-makers lied.

The claim is a conclusion you dispute, not a lie. The recordings were not fabricated.

There is a scandal. That is a fact. You dispute the facts underlying the accusation, which is a valid position, but it does not make the scandal go away.

J

 

[Formaldehyde]

It is no more a valid "scandal" than ACORN or Benghazi. It is being concocted by the usual suspects. And you apparently willingly allowed yourself to be deceived yet again for quite obvious partisan reasons.

Again, there is no "profit" in stem cells in the US other than that being made by a single company. And much of their profitability comes from selling other medical supplies to research institutions. If the US government performed this invaluable service, there would be no need for them to fill this niche.

 

[El_Machinae]

Some argue that because one human zygote has the capacity to become two (or more) human zygotes, that is evidence that individual human life does not begin at conception.

Not really. It's more a counter-claim that a zygote is not a person. No one denies that it's a potential person, but this fact that it can split to become two people is good evidence that it's not a person. It's just one of many pieces that shows that the black-and-white definitions aren't cromulent.

If this is indeed the process by which monozygotic twinning takes place, there is a very real sense in which one twin is "parenting" the other.

You should know that this won't get much traction with people. It's not a yeast budding, where one part has 'older' DNA than the other and so we can call the bud an 'offspring'.

And your re-defining things makes things ... well ... messy. Twins are no longer siblings. A mother gives birth to her grandchild and her child.

Now, it doesn't matter from my meta-viewpoint that I've argued whether a zygotes is 'twinning' or if it's 'budding'. But to say that it's 'budding' IS kinda ridiculous.

Science can tell us when individual, biological life begins.

Individual, biological life begins every time a cell divides. But so what? We're talking about when human life becomes morally significant. And the language of many pro-lifers is sloppy. They seem to think a zygote is a person. But it cannot be. It's a little bundle of potential, but that's it. So is every single cell in your body, er, mostly.

"Twins" is used to counter-point the ascribing a singular noun to the zygote. I dunno, but saying that moms are giving birth to their grandchildren is a extremely messy workaround.

 

[useless]

Again, it's not a scandal because the claims by the video makers turned out to be false; PP does NOT profit from the selling of fetal tissue or organs.

The recordings were dishonestly edited and stripped of their full, original context. You can keep believing it's a scandal, but im going by facts here Onejay and yes, the scandal does indeed go away if the claims are proven and shown to be untrue, which they have since been.

 

[onejayhawk]

Again, it's not a scandal because the claims by the video makers turned out to be false; PP does NOT profit from the selling of fetal tissue or organs.

The recordings were dishonestly edited and stripped of their full, original context. You can keep believing it's a scandal, but im going by facts here Onejay and yes, the scandal does indeed go away if the claims are proven and shown to be untrue, which they have since been.

Tell that to Lizzie Bordon. She was acquitted. The scandal still live a century after her death.

J

 

[Commodore]

Again, it's not a scandal because the claims by the video makers turned out to be false; PP does NOT profit from the selling of fetal tissue or organs.

The recordings were dishonestly edited and stripped of their full, original context. You can keep believing it's a scandal, but im going by facts here Onejay and yes, the scandal does indeed go away if the claims are proven and shown to be untrue, which they have since been.

Don't waste your time arguing this. The anti-bodily rights crowd is always going to see this as a scandal, no matter how many facts come out proving otherwise. PP will always be the Devil himself to them and they will always assume the worst from them, even if "the worst" is a completely fabricated accusation.

Don't worry though, the people that actually matter know the truth and PP's funding isn't in any real danger over this. Especially since the anti-bodily rights crowd is a steadily shrinking crowd and will soon have almost no voting power or any significant voice in the decision making process in this nation.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Tell that to Lizzie Bordon. She was acquitted. The scandal still live a century after her death.

J

And the moral is: It is best not to have your perceived misdeeds set to easily remembered verse.

With election time still a year away,
Onejayhawk has had his say:
Hillary's fate is grim defeat
Beat by any Republican still on his feet.

 

[warpus]

I find it odd that this "Abortions must be illegal, c'mon" minority continues coming out of the woodwork. Access to abortions for women isn't going anywhere, it is here to stay. History's not on your side, dudes, unless you want to move to a theocracy somewhere or maybe Poland.

 

[Farm Boy]

I find it odd that this "Abortions must be illegal, c'mon" minority continues coming out of the woodwork. Access to abortions for women isn't going anywhere, it is here to stay. History's not on your side, dudes, unless you want to move to a theocracy somewhere or maybe Poland.

Empires fall.

Sleep not so soundly in your bed. Things change. Angry people are discounted at your peril. They're usually angry because for a good reason, even if it seems stupid or evil.

 

[Commodore]

Empires fall.

Sleep not so soundly in your bed. Things change. Angry people are discounted at your peril. They're usually angry because for a good reason, even if it seems stupid or evil.

Actually, my experience tells me that people are not usually angry for a good reason. Anger is born out of misunderstanding, and that misunderstanding is usually on the part of the one who is angry.