New Iowa Law Restricts Abortion To Before Most Women Know They're Pregnant

[RoadRunner79]

Two words: cerebral cortex.

You seem to keep changing things as the conversation moves along.   Why are you now changing the criteria to cerebral cortex?   Are you just arbitrarily picking things, that might make your argument.   That and unless you have changed your mind, you previously indicated, that you would support abortion after the third trimester anyway, so arguing that they are not a person until they have brain function (or now a cerebral cortex) seems like sophism.   Brain development is ongoing in the early years of child development as well.   Do you also support infanticide?

The problem with using brain functioning in this way, and relating it to the criteria of brain death, seems to lie in the reason why brain death is used for clinical death in the first place.  That is, that the brain is the central integrating component of the body.  As long as the brain is still sending signals, to muscles and other systems, then there is a chance that the person can be revived.  Once the brain quits telling the body to work, then even though the body may still be working (with the assistance of machines), there is no hope for recovery.  Which brings us back to our issue of people who have minimal brain activity, but lack conscientiousness.  As long as there is still hope for recovery, then they are still people with human rights.    Someone doesn't cease being a person, once they are sedated.  And killing someone with minimally developed or severely handicapped mental abilities is murder (as would be noted that there are fetal homicide laws).  I think that it is a slippery slope once you start de-humanizing people based on their mental capabilities.  

I think that part of the issue, is that you are trying to reason towards why it is wrong to kill other humans.  Now you may only wish to kill small, defenseless developing humans; however your reasoning doesn't only apply to just them.  And I think that is a large part of the problem.   You know that it is wrong to kill people, and you want to allow for the killing of the fetal baby.  So you are trying to reconcile the two things.  However I think the question is being begged;  why is it wrong to kill humans in the first place?   We both agree that it is (I assume);  but, how do we get there.   This is the issue of having an objective moral  basis for the belief.  You are having trouble reasoning your way out of them being human, because it was never reasoned that it is wrong to unjustly kill others in the first place.   Are humans special, do we have inalienable rights, which is based on a moral fact?  Or is it subjective, with each person or group deciding for themselves.  To what is it, that we appeal to any rights at all?  Can we do so, when society doesn't acknowledge those rights? Is there something outside of subjective opinion, that we are looking to, to say that anyone has a right to life?