Come to England

[Tiberius]

Sentience is the "I" that we mean when we say "I am". It is the state of being self-aware of one's own existence. It is the ability to experience reality.

The problem with that definition is that babies aren't sentient...unless you can recall being a newborn and being self-aware. So, do you support the mother's right to choose whether her newborn baby lives or dies? What about mentally disabled people who are locked in a baby-like state? I've worked with such disabilities before; are you in favour of letting their families kill them off over their lack of self-awareness?

Additionally, if we accept determinism, self-awareness is an illusion and no more important in the grand scheme of things than anything else.

We have no moral obligations toward things that do not think, do not feel and do not have any capacity for self-awareness. You can't torture a rock. You can't murder a chair. These are things which don't feel pain, fear or any other kind of experience.

Yet unborn children (in later developments) can feel pain. Some on this forum have espoused the view that abortion should be legal up until birth; do you agree with that? I think it is simpler than this; I think that we have moral obligations towards our own species, since we are a very social species. We don't talk about "sentient rights", we talk about "human rights", and unborn children are genetically human.

A single-cell organism is a thing. It has no brain by which to experience reality or operate on any basis other than automated stimulus-response. We think nothing of taking anti-biotics and thereby cause a holocaust of microscopic beings. Nor should we.

Yet an embryo has something that other microscopic beings do not; human DNA. It will develop into a child, and ultimately an adult if it is allowed to be born. You cannot say the same about anti-biotics or any other microscopic being.

I'm speaking as one who used to be "pro-life". My argument then was "person A's right to life trumps person B's right to choice". When I studied fetal development, I realized there was no "person A" and so the entire foundation of my beliefs was gone. I've been "pro-choice" ever since.

I'm speaking as one who used to be "pro-choice". My argument now is not about "person A" but about "human A". Again, we don't have "person rights", we have "human rights". It makes no sense at all to support human rights for humans who happen to have been born, and disregard them for humans that have not yet been born.