Attack at Planned Parenthood Clinic

[Tiberius]

It's getting late here so I'll do the next round of responses tomorrow, but I thought I'd address something which I believe someone brought up a few pages back, and it's a common argument I've heard used.

It's usually in response to the anti-abortion argument that embryos are humans, and it basically goes "human cells are not human beings, therefore embryos are not human beings. If human cells were human beings, cutting someone's hair / scratching someone / <insert similar example here> would be murder".

My response is this:

I agree, human cells =/= human beings, but human beings are a collection of human cells. The entire collection is called a human being. If you lose a few cells here or there, you're slightly less of a human being in terms of number of cells, but you're still a human being (and those cells are usually easily replaced). Killing a few cells from a human isn't murder, because those few cells don't equate to the human being as a whole, but when the human being is in it's earliest developmental form, when the entire human being is a few cells, killing them is killing the entire human being.

That's the difference.