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Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

Meh, those "personhood at conception" [0] folks will always be whining at reality anyway, since what they imagine to be "plain common sense" is actually crazy. To wit:

1. Identical twins from one conception are not a single person.

2. An entity with chimerism (two conceptions) is one person, not two people simultaneously.

3. If I make an SCNT clone [1] of someone, that's another person, not property or a mobile body part.

4. They aren't freaking out about zillions of regular miscarriages, because they don't actually believe those are people-deaths.

_________

[0] They say life, but it really helps to nail them down to a much more specific definition ASAP, because they often to retreat into fallacies of equivocation. HeLa cells are not a person.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_cell_nuclear_transfer

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Many families have private ceremonies for miscarriages

I am personally aware. Yet why do you believe people declaring chanting "life begins at conception" do not make preventing miscarriages into a part of their national political platform the same way as criminalizing abortion?

That's like someone who says "cows are people" and wants the death penalty for hamburgers, but they're a-OK with dairy farms and leather.

It shows that even the proponents of the slogan don't actually believe it.

Miscarriages are a personal tragedy. There is no way to prevent them.

"Does God have the ability to prevent miscarriages, but will not? Then why call him God?"

Or something like that... can't remember how it goes exactly.

Where do you get this expectation that biological processes should have a zero percent failure rate?

Embryo selection is the easiest way to minimize the risk of miscarriage.

The only reason why you would say that there is no way to prevent them is that I infer from your posts that you are most likely against embryo selection.

The comment I was responding to suggested eliminating miscarriage as a policy objective. I said that was impossible. Your response with a suggestion to minimize risk while increasing the amount of total human death does not address the point, regardless of my comment history (ad hom.?).

> why do you believe people declaring chanting "life begins at conception" do not make preventing miscarriages into a part of their national political platform

Because it's already a national political consensus?

National health organizations go to serious lengths to make sure women are not unknowingly consuming things which would cause them to miscarry. Assaulting a woman and causing her to miscarry is penalized with charges above and beyond what would be assigned if not for the miscarriage. Societally, we try to encourage people to be gentle, careful, and accommodating towards/with pregnant women, and to encourage mothers to not drink or smoke while they're carrying.

What strawman world are you living in where this isn't the case?

You're right that there is a consensus of "miscarriages are unfortunate, let's try to minimize how often it happens."

What does not exist is a consensus that a blastocyst is (consistently) equal in personhood to a newborn, with equal levels of loss and tragedy. I trust that this is obvious without the need for lurid comparisons.

So while the two vectors may share a direction, the amplitudes are very different. Kind of like how it's important to floss your teeth, it's not so important that failure becomes a crime.

You would be surprised. Plenty of (sufficiently religious) people will indeed hold funerals for and bury miscarriages, if they're at all identifiable. What you seem to expect is that they attempt to force other people to do so -- but unlike killing an organism, "failing to mourn" an organism is not really a crime under any moral framework, so the impetus just isn't there in the same way.

So much straw here I'm looking for Rumpelstiltskin.

Then what do you believe the slogan "life begins at conception" actually means instead?

Why do you think it has a meaning other than literal?

"Just read the words" isn't a good-faith response.

If one actually does that, reading it literally and without context, then it becomes a flat-out lie: The vast majority of biological "life" on the planet never involves "conception" at all.

I'm happy to restrict it to human life.

What do you think it means?

Stop trying to disguise your insincere trolling as the Socratic method.

If you label something as a "strawman", that means you are already aware of distinct and relevant differences between it and the "real" thing.

But instead of presenting those things that you claim to already have, you're running away, unable to explain your own words! Much like someone that hurled "strawman" as a reflexive insult after they felt uncomfortable reading the text.

My position is the literal meaning of my words in everyday usage.

Your rhetorical games belie your ability to engage in simple discussion.

Good luck!

The literal meaning is incoherent nonsense because the sperm and egg were both alive before conception.

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