Abortion/Consciousness/Life

[Jenny A]

Zygotes are human beings. You can open up a biology text and look at the life cycle of a human being. It will show a zygote...or a fetus. From a purely scientific standpoint zygotes are human beings in the earliest stages of development.

Not really. I'm sure text books so describe the zygote in the human life cycle, but that has nothing to do with whether a zygote, which is really just a collection of unthinking unfeeling cells, is a person. It just happens to be a collection that could become a person.

Honoring the wishes made by dead people when they were alive is not providing moral protection to dead people. It is simply honoring the wishes made by a person when they were alive.

Yes, but you see they are dead when we do the honoring.

To my knowledge there are no laws against dishonoring a corpse. There are laws against desecrating a corpse....but there are also laws against vandalizing a car....and cars aren't granted moral protection. Laws against desecrating a corpse do not exist to protect the corpse. They exist for public health reasons, they exist to for the sake of the loved ones left behind, they exist a means of criminalizing the cover-up of crimes.

To desecrate is not just to vandalize it is much more specific than that. To desecrate is to:

1: to violate the sanctity of : profane <desecrate a shrine>
2: to treat disrespectfully, irreverently, or outrageously <the kind of shore development … that has desecrated so many waterfronts — John Fischer>

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/desecrate

And as you might guess from the definition of desecration one of the original reasons for anti-desecration laws was honoring the corpse for religious reasons. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/23...24593.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desecration
We may have added public health and forensics to our list of reasons for not desecrating a corpse but honoring the dead remains one of the prime reasons it is frowned upon.

Notice that this statute has nothing to do with hiding a corpse or public health:

Fla. Statute 872.06(2) A person who mutilates, commits sexual abuse upon, or otherwise grossly abuses a dead human body commits a felony of the second degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084. Any act done for a bona fide medical purpose or for any other lawful purpose does not under any circumstance constitute a violation of this section.