Summations Only

You had me going there for a minute. Up until this sentence, I thought you were being completely rational. For the most part though, you were. Just how convenient is it to get an abortion? Do you honestly think that the majority of abortions are by young women who sleep around unprotected, get pregnant then use abortion as birth control? Do you have ANY idea what toll an abortion takes on a woman? Do you really think it is a decision ANY woman makes over her morning coffee? "Well, off to my abortion. Gonna go have some more unprotected sex right after"? Granted, there are people who do this, but for every one that does, there are a handful of other women who medically need the procedure or it is the most absolutely devistating decision they make in their entire life and only do so because of a mistake. I know two women who had abortions and trust me, it wasn't "convenient".

Yes I do belive in a soul. I know of no physical evidence for a soul. A soul is a gift from God. It enters the human when the human becomes life. Am I wrong? Maybe. Are you wrong? Maybe. It just appears to me after living my life with a wonderful wife, loving children, a little girl who died in the womb at 7 months, and beautiful grandchildren, I don't want to error on the side of being wrong as to when life begins. I can't phantom ending a possible life that is conceived by the natural process of our evolutionary process.

So you value the possible life of the fetus over the actual, extant life of the woman?

Is it your moral viewpoint that until about a few years after birth it's ok for the "moral agent" the mother to terminate the "life" she gave birth to?

This is from the wiki link you citedThe Court later rejected Roe's trimester framework, while affirming Roe's central holding that a person has a right to abortion up until viability.[1] The Roe decision defined "viable" as being "potentially able to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid," adding that viability "is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks."[2]that is making a decision as to when life begins. If the court had ruled that life began at conception, it could not have allowed abortion. Your are dealing in semantics.

I'm sorry to hear that. Clearly you felt (and feel) the loss of your unborn child. For what it's worth, this would be the third trimester and I would consider the fetus to be worthy of moral consideration - it would have a developed nervous system and have passed the point where brain waves can be detected, meaning it could potentially be aware of its own existence.However...your wife has almost certainly had many other eggs fertilized by your sperm, but fail to implant correctly in her uterine wall or otherwise naturally fail to proceed to a point where you could even tell she was pregnant. It's estimated that around 60% of all pregnancies end this way, without anyone even noticing.These embryos would not have had a distinct nervous system - there would be absolutely no way in known biology for them to have awareness of anything, in the same way that a clump of shed skin cells has no awareness because it too has no brain. The embryos would not have valued their own existence, because they would have been physically incapable of being aware of their own existence. Since I derive the moral weight of human life from self-awareness, I would not mourn their loss. I would not consider their failure to develop to even be sad (though perhaps frustrating, if my wife and I were trying to have children and failing), because a clump of not-aware cells is not worthy of any moral consideration.Did those embryos have "souls?" Did they carry (to you) the same moral weight as the daughter who died just 8 weeks before birth, or the children you were able to see grow? If not, then again, there is a massive and obvious inconsistency in your moral reasoning. This question is not rhetorical, I'd like to know your opinion.

I don't attach any significance to chromosomes as life itself. I am saying that there is a point when life begins, and it appears the most logical point is when the new life has assumed all the necessary attributes to begin developing along the evolutinary pathway. So when life begins, It is my moral opinion that no one has the right to terminate that life.

Yes I believe in the existence of a soul. I think it is implanted in a human being when life begins.

Even the mother, if her life is at risk? Is the mothers life less morally worthy than the unborn child?Let's put it another way. You and I are trapped by a deranged supervillain, who gives us a diabolical choice: he will try to kill us both. There is a slim chance that we will both survive. However, one of us could sacrifice his life in a distraction that would almost certainly save the other person.Am I morally obligated to sacrifice myself to save you? Are you morally obligated to sacrifice yourself to save me?If our lives are equally valued (ie, we're both human beings), then while it would be morally praiseworthy to sacrifice oneself in defense of another, it is not morally obligatory. One can only be morally obligated to sacrifice oneself if the sacrifice would preserve more "moral weight" than the value of the sacrificed individual, such as sacrificing one for the lives of a hundred.Is a mother morally obligated to sacrifice herself to preserve the life of an unborn child? If so, then you must be placing more moral weight on a fetus than you place on the mother - which opens a number of other moral consequences as related to miscarriages, such as a pregnant woman becoming guilty of homicide if she has a miscarriage due to smoking, drinking, heavy exercise, or even just not staying in bed the entire time to make sure she can't fall.If not, then you must support abortion in the case of a threat to the life of the mother.Any other position is logically inconsistent. Which position do you take?

One of my sources is Ernst Mayr "What Evolution is."p.106 "Each individual is a unique combination of the 2 sets of parental genes, and it is the phenotype, the product of the genotype (the recombined set of genes) that is ordinarily the natural target of selection...--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I donot say one life is worth more than another. I say all lifes are equal and no man has the right to terminate a life. It is quite a different situation from having a miscarriage to making the intentional decision to terminate a life no matter in what stage that life may be.

So an unborn foetus that is 18 weeks old is just as valuable as the woman who is hosting this foetus? I'm not talking about men. I'm talking about the woman that is providing the life, without which there IS no child. And yet, you've failed to actually provide any evidence or even reason for this other than your personal testimony.

No. And I'll thank you not to make such insinuations.The OP only asked about when life begins. It did not ask about terminating life. I responded only to what was asked. And you should have responded to only what I wrote.

And you seem to be demonstrating my point precisely. That being that the "brain activity" argument -for person hood, put us in the precarious position to decide what exactly is considered viable brain activity. This of course sets us on a slippery slope to which its ultimate end is to judge ones worth based on mental ability. Who is worthy to make such a judgement? Yes but you should note that in all cases where pulling "plugs" are even considered, the prognosis is always the deciding factor. There is not a single case where the doctor said the patient will make a full recovery within the next 9 months to a year, so you better decide now rather or not you want to pull the plug. Therefore though arguments for brain activity seem somewhat logical, they are not at all logical in any cases where it is known that the patient will absolutely achieve full mental function. Which of course is the known outcome to almost all fetuses. Yes that is what many conservative Christians think. However I think I have adequately pointed out that the issue has nothing to do with religious values or morals etc.. and is solely about person hood. If it is not a person then the woman absolutely has the right to terminate it. If it is a person, then the woman has the right to do anything she wishes to her own body so long as it doesn't endanger the life of another person. If we can't determine if it is or isn't a person, then we need to error on the side of safety.

No my analogy actually does take into account the life of the other person. In fact in the situation I described with the armed assailant, the "other life" was the Police Officer. My point was that given the possibility of harming someone innocent, the best "choice" was to error on the side of safety. You sit there and quote all kinds of stats on child birth, but the undeniable fact is the entire issue rests on rather it is a person or not. If not then by all means do with it as you wish. If it is a person, then as a person it has the right to live so long as that right doesn't impose an immediate threat to the mothers life. Likewise if we can't tell if it is a person or not then we must act as responsible beings and error on the side of safety.