Why I Am Pro-Life

[Rahul]

Just as fr0d0 points out, why do you feel an obligation to treat a once living human with respect, but not a growing human?

Pure fucking empathy. Emotions. Not logic. I would treat that dead hunk of meat with respect because it used to house someone, a person, that people loved.

Completely illogical. It doesn't really matter in an intellectual sense. Not at all. When my parents die the mortician can treat their corpses like filth. And intellectually it doesn't matter. They can't hurt them.

But emotionally I identify those people with those physical forms. So if you mistreat those chunks of meat, I will become emotionally enraged. Even though you can't hurt a person that doesn't exist.

Humans are not logical creatures. We are animals that have the capacity to think logically. Most of the time we don't operate that way. We respond emotionally.

Does the qualifier that a brain dead person 'used' to have higher brain function, therefore is more of a human that a zygote, really make sense?

It's a not person. A NOT person. There's no person there. It only matters to the emotions of people that are. That's the only difference.

Does it matter that the human on life support used to have a brain if it no longer does? Why?

Emotion. Not logic. Just unreasonable, unsupportable by the facts emotion.

The brain dead person is a human, just as the growing fetus is.

What is a human? I don't think we agree on that definition. It's a human corpse. But it's not a human. It's not a person. It's just dead meat.

They are both members of the species homo sapiens.

DNA analysis would say that. But I wouldn't. Having human DNA doesn't make a thing human.

The term 'person' carries with it connotations of something more than just human. A person has personality. Feelings, thoughts, memories. A dead body is without personage. A zygote and a fetus are not dead bodies.

A zygote doesn't have a personality. A fetus doesn't have a personality. You can no more kill a zygote than you can kill a corpse. It's already not alive.

View it this way. You have person A on life support. Their higher brain function is absent from birth. However, there is a high probability that this person could have cognitive function in the future. Would you feel justified in killing this person because they are not a 'person' now, even though potential is there?

I would feel no moral guilt over ending it. None. I don't play the lottery. The odds are too great against you. That's just a failed, could have been, human. Living corpse.

A growing fetus is a person.

No it's not. It's a potential person. Up to 40% of fertilized eggs auto-abort biologically. Most without the woman even knowing anything happened. Manually aborting is the same. It's not a human yet.

I'm a family guy. I know you mentioned having a 10 month child. I'm a proud father of two beautiful little girls. Ages 8 & 9. I love them to death. Personally I would never want a woman I personally impregnated to abort my potential offspring.

It's her choice, and I would respect it. But she wouldn't be killing my child if she did so. She would be eliminating the possible child I might have had. Nothing more than that.

You seem to differentiate between person and human while they both mean the same thing, yet carry different connotations.

Actually I use the term human and person interchangeably as meaning a living being. An indivudual. I'll switch between the two. A fetus and a corpse is neither a human nor a person. It has no personality. No memory. No quirks. It's just a biological chunk of meat. No matter if machinery or a womb is keeping it biologically ticking, it's not a human/person.

They are both human, yes.

Biologically it is a human. What is a human to you? Do you know me? Think of the one person that you know more than anyone else in life. Maybe a spouse or a sibling. Now imagine them brain dead.

Is that person you know so well still there?

Fuck no it's not. It's left the house. It's just the empty remains. That person you loved is gone. No one home.