Comment by User23 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by User23 | Hacker News Reader

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> That's a false equivalence. "Pro-life" advocates use a topic that some people find emotive purely for political ends.

No, we think killing innocent human beings is gross and wrong in principle.

There’s nothing emotional or religious about it. If you accept the premises that a fetus is an innocent human being and that intentionally killing innocent human beings is wrong, then if you have any respect for logic you must conclude that abortion is wrong.

Biology tells us that at the moment of conception that single diploid cell is a human being. Therefore, in that model, in order to justify killing a fetus it must either be unintentional or the fetus must not be innocent. The intentional case can apply to procedures that are intended to help the mother that unfortunately harm the fetus. For the other case I can’t see how a fetus could be guilty of anything deserving death. However, as an counter-example, I’m given to understand that’s the case in Jewish law at least some of the time.

Anyhow as you can see there is no deception, in framing or otherwise. It’s just simple premises and sound logic from them. On the other hand I rarely see logical moral reasoning with generally acceptable premises from the pro-Choice side, so you're correct that the subject is, for some people, primarily an emotional one.

Anyhow I've kept this to just a simple explanation of why we're pro-Life, because I don't think HN is the right place to debate political issues, but it is the right place to correct erroneous statements.

> Biology tells us that at the moment of conception that single diploid cell is a human being.

Ah yes the deification. When was the last time you spoke with Biology? Because when I speak to it it says no such thing.

There's nothing metaphysical about that. Scientifically, "a human" is an alive organism of the species "Homo sapiens." A blastocyst, embryo, or fetus is undisputedly alive, and undisputedly has human DNA. It is "a human." Now, it's a human at an early stage of human development--and that might have various ethical and moral implications--but it's scientifically unsupportable to say that it's not a human.

For example, the OED defines "tadpole" as "the tailed aquatic larva of an amphibian (frog, toad, newt, or salamander) breathing through gills and lacking legs until the later stages of its development." There is nothing metaphysical about saying that a tadpole is "a frog."

> Scientifically, "a human" is an alive organism of the species "Homo sapiens."

You seem to be conflating linguistics with biology. If we agree to change the definition of a word "human", this isn't going to make pro-lifers happy, because their problem is not with words.

Also, I don't think "human" means alive Homo Sapiens. Human and Homo Sapiens are synonyms.

> A blastocyst, embryo, or fetus is undisputedly alive

But that's exactly what is being disputed. For example a braindead person is "undisputedly" dead, yet an embryo has even less brain activity.

> For example a braindead person is "undisputedly" dead

No, they’re not. If they were indisputably dead we’d just say dead. The qualifier means it’s something other than actually dead.

You could quibble that after medical death biological processes continue in various cells and organs for a while though. And of course there’s the old first responder’s adage that the patient isn’t dead until he’s warm and dead. Cold and dead, as in fished out of ice water, isn’t necessary dead dead.

They do not have agency and so are functionally dead.

This is a good example of a premise that isn’t generally acceptable. If we agree that persons who lack agency have no right to not be killed then we can kill infants, the severely mentally ill, involuntarily commited persons, and arguably severely physically disabled persons.

Not to mention, determining who does and doesn’t have agency and thus a right to not be killed strikes me as considerably trickier than the basic medical definition of dead, which is basically no heartbeat. Hence the observation that cold and dead might not really be dead. Severe hypothermia can make the pulse undetectable.

> basic medical definition of dead, which is basically no heartbeat

This is an extremely reductive statement. There is no unified medical definition of death, precisely because it's a highly controversial topic.

Closest to what you're trying to say is UDDA (which, ironically, is currently being revised), and it explicitly mentions brain death: "An individual who has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, is dead."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Determination_of_Death...

See how casually throwing in the word "undisputable" in a discussion of a controversial topic triggers a dispute?

> I can’t see how a fetus could be guilty of anything deserving death

Paradoxically the Catholics do (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin) I’m sure there’s finicky nuance that the current devout could counter with—apparently they recently decided they were just kidding about limbo being a thing—but that was the mindset drilled into me during my formative years.

You use an abrahamic notion of human being defined as a soulless meatbag. Diploid cell, lol. If your body except for one diploid cell was pulverized, you won't consider it death? Stoics redefined human being to be primarily mind, and body being secondary to mind. Mind is the difference between a fetus and a human.

> You use an abrahamic notion of human being defined as a soulless meatbag.

I use the Christian notion of a human being defined as a human body and a human soul unified in one creature. I believe both human body and soul are created at the same time, namely conception. While most Muslims agree with that assessment, most Jews do not[1]. Therefore it's not an Abrahamic notion.

In fact, the very concept of a soul, or anima in Latin, is that which animates a body. By definition, every animate creature has a soul because it is the name for the animating principle. And so death then is the transition from being a living animated body with a soul to being an inanimate dead body without a soul.

[1] The Talmud says that the soul enters the body with the first breath.

A simpler argument is “why is killing children in a classroom with a gun wrong, but killing children in the womb with a scalpel ok?”

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