And even if you dispute my scientific claim, I can reprove the fact through metaphysics. In metaphysics there are accidental and substantial changes. Accidental changes are changes to the subject which does not change the essence of the subject. Hair for example can be bleached or colored, however the underlying essence of “hair-ness” does not change. It is still the same hair before and after the hair color was altered. The change being made to the hair does not change the overall essence of the hair. A substantial change, on the other hand, does change the essence of the subject making it something completely different than before. Thus the subject becomes a new subject.
Take the sperm and the egg. The sperm and egg alone cannot grow a fully functional human body with free will. It is not until the sperm and egg meet that a substantial change happens and a human life begins. There is no other point in the development of the human body after conception that can be proven as the substantial change other than conception itself. Birth cannot be the substantial change that grants humanness because there is no difference between a baby one second before birth and one second after birth which could prove that a substantial change had happened. The same can be said for any other arbitrary milestone of development such as first steps or age 18 or age 21. All of those are accidental changes in which the overall essence of humanness is not changed. The only point where you can point to a visible and provable substantial change is conception. The sperm and the egg are not simply the sperm and the egg after the moment of conception and thanks to modern scientific equipment; you can see it happen before your very eyes.
Therefore, it is philosophically impossible to claim that any group after conception is less than metaphysically human.
If you still disagree, there is no hope of convincing you of anything if you cannot accept scientific and metaphysical fact.
THEREFORE: Biological Human life begins at conceptions the same as all other mammals
2) Now we come to those who try and separate biological life from personhood. The problem with that line or argumentation is anytime you draw any line other than the inception of the child (at conception) you end up drawing a false line that can also be applied to people who are adults so either human life has intrinsic value or it doesn't....there is no in between. I will go through the most used false lines and show how each one is false.
For these I use the acronym SLED
Size
Level of Development
Environment
dependency
SIZE
We will start with size: The unborn is clearly smaller than a born human. It’s hard to reason how a difference in size, though, disqualifies someone from being a person. A four year-old is smaller than a fourteen year-old. Can we kill her because she’s not as big as a teenager? No, because a human being’s value is not based on their size. She’s still equally a person even though she differs in that characteristic. In the same way, the unborn is smaller than a four year-old. If we can’t kill the four-year old because she’s smaller, then we can’t kill the unborn because she’s smaller either.
You say that A is big and B is small. It is size then: The larger having the right to kill the smaller. Take care. By this rule you are to be victim to the first person you meet with a larger body than your own.
LEVEL OF DEVELOPMENT
The unborn is also less developed than a born human being. How does this fact, though, disqualify the unborn from personhood? A four year-old girl can’t bear children because her reproductive system is less developed than a fourteen year-old girl. That doesn’t disqualify her from personhood. She is still as equally valuable as a child-bearing teen. The unborn is also less developed than the four year-old. Therefore, we can’t disqualify her from personhood for the same reason we can’t disqualify the four year-old. Both are merely less developed than older human beings.
You do not mean size exactly? -You mean that born human persons are developmentally the superiors of the pre-born and therefore have the right to kill the pre-born? Take care again. By this rule you are to be victim to the first person you meet who is more developed in his mind and body than your own.
ENVIRONMENT
The unborn is located in a different environment than a born human. How does your location, though, affect your value? Can changing your environment alter your status as a person? Where you are has no bearing on who you are. An astronaut who spacewalks in orbit is in a radically different environment than a person on the planet. No one could reasonably deny his personhood simply because he’s in a different location. Scuba divers who swim under water and spelunkers who crawl through caves are equally as valuable as humans who ride in hot-air balloons. If changing your environment can’t change your fundamental status, then being inside or outside a uterus can’t be relevant either. How could a 7-inch journey through the birth canal magically transform a value-less human into a valuable person? Nothing has changed except their location.
The problem is that you cannot metaphysically show how traveling out the birth canal of a woman magically bestows personhood. There is no substantial change between 1 second before birth and 1 second after birth. This is also appealing to the false line of "ENVIRONMENT" because whether inside or outside the womb, the essence of being a human being has not changed and thus it is logically false to claim that being outside the womb magically bestows more rights than someone inside the womb.
While birth does not violate its own definitions or expand beyond the definitions, birth is an arbitrary point. There is no objective change just before birth to just after birth that can be used as a significant reason to have personhood bestowed upon you that was not present before. It is no more arbitrary than using age 18 or age 21. Being such, I could easily argue that personhood begins at age 18 or 21 thus changing infanticide, homicide against children and overall child abuse legal.
DEGREE OF DEPENDENCY
The unborn is dependent upon the mother’s body for nutrition and a proper environment. It’s hard to see, though, how depending upon another person disqualifies you from being a person. Newborns and toddlers still depend upon their parents to provide nutrition and a safe environment. Indeed, some third-world countries require children to be breast fed because formula is not available. Can a mother kill her newborn son because he depends on her body for nutrition? Or, imagine you alone witnessed a toddler fall into a swimming pool. Would you be justified in declaring him not valuable simply because he depended on you for his survival? Of course not! Since the unborn depends on his mother in the same way, it’s not reasonable to disqualify his value either. Notice that although toddler and teens differ from each other in the four SLED categories, we don’t disqualify toddlers from personhood. Since born and unborn humans differ in exactly the same ways, we can’t disqualify the unborn from personhood either. You could do the same for (First Breath) by asking the person if I could kill him/her when he/she is holding his/her breath........or mental ability to think/be aware by asking the person if I can kill him/her when he/she is not thinking or asleep. In each instance, I can take their definition and apply it to a born human being thus showing the weakness of the argument (or lack thereof).
You do not mean environment/location exactly? -You mean that the pre-born are not as viable because they are still dependent on the mother and the womb and therefore have the right to kill the pre-born? Take care even still. By this rule you are to be victim to the first person whose independence is higher than your own.
THEREFORE: There is no other place other than conception that can be the metaphysical beginning of personhood
AUTONOMY?
If the baby is biologically and metaphysically a unique and separate human being from the mother (which is scientifically and metaphysically proven), therefore, it is the killing of another human being by definition. If that is true, then how can one morally excuse the killing of another human being outside of reasonable self defense?
One way would be to claim that abortion was an act of “self defense” against an invasive baby. I will show however, why such a claim is ridiculous and philosophically/intellectually dishonest. Any attempt to claim that the woman’s autonomy is being “violated by the presence of the baby in the womb blatantly ignores the causality of how that baby got there.
THE BABY DID NOT;
a) Suddenly or magically pop into existence. That is metaphysically impossible
Or
b) The baby did not of his/her own free will choose to enter the womb and thus violate the bodily autonomy of the mother. That is also impossible and a denial of how we know that conception and pregnancy occurs.
The mother cannot claim that her autonomy was violated when it was her own freely chosen action of having sex that that caused pregnancy. It would be like throwing a rock at a glass window and then claiming that the rock was violating your house by breaking the window. I threw the rock and that is why the rock broke the window. Such an argument denies basic causality and thus is intellectually dishonest.
BUT WHAT ABOUT RAPE YOU SAY?
Yes……I cannot make the same causality argument in rape because the woman was not a willing participant in the sex which caused the pregnancy. Even so…there is still a logical problem with making this objection to my argument…..
Rape only makes up 1% or less of all cases of abortion. To bring up rape as an argument for abortion when rape/incest only makes up 1% or less of all abortions is the logical fallacy of composition (aka using what is true about a http://part….in this case 1% of 60 million abortions…..in order to make the same statement about the whole……..99% of abortions that are not rape/incest related). The only way to NOT fall into the intellectually dishonest contradiction and fallacy of using the extreme minority of rape/incest in order to justify abortion as a whole is to admit that abortion cannot be justified with the autonomy argument outside of rape and incest.
So let's talk about autonomy, abortion and rape/incest
They would use the objection of the “Famous Violinist” analogy where a person finds themselves hooked up to a famous violinist (against your will) in order to save the life of said violinist. This argument highlights that regardless of whether or not it saves the life of the violinist, it violates my rights to refuse. The problem with this argument is that even though the woman was violated by the rapist, the argument is still misappropriating the violation of the rapist on the woman to the baby who is innocent regardless of how he/she was conceived. Plus, any attempt to say that the woman has a right to remove the baby (even if the intention is not to kill the baby) is like saying that I have a right to eject a stowaway in my plane after I have taken off. Yes that action alone does not directly kill the person, but if I threw that stowaway out of my plane at 30,000 feet, I would be in denial if I said that I did not know that the fall would kill him. The same goes with babies. Saying that a woman has a right to eject the baby from the womb at younger than 20-24 weeks would most assuredly kill the baby and even after 25 weeks, it is not a sure thing that a prematurely born baby would survive even with our new and updated technology in NICU wards.
A better analogy to use would “The Alpine Hut” analogy which goes something like this………
A woman wakes up trapped in a hut in the alps. It is not the fault of the woman that she is there and it is not the choice of the woman to be there. In the hut she finds that there is a newborn who needs to be fed and cared for. In searching the house, you find that there is an ample supply of food and the woman happens to be lactating anyway. It would be wrong for the woman just to ignore the baby despite the fact that caring for the baby does not lessen her ability to survive until the police finally come and rescue her along with the baby. What person upon finding the alpine hut along with the living woman and a dead baby would not fault the woman for refusing to take care of the baby despite the fact that there was plenty of food and nursing the baby does not diminish the amount of food available for the mother? Even though the woman was violated by the rapist, the argument is still misappropriating the violation of the rapist on the woman to the baby who is innocent regardless of how he/she was conceived AND it is flawed to argue for a woman’s right to eject the baby while ignoring the death sentence that it would give much like ejecting my stowaway at 30,000 feet or the woman in the alpine hut refusing to feed the child at no person harm to herself (other than slight inconvenience).
THEREFORE the argument is logically flawed.
THEREFORE It is impossible to not give humans from conception the same basic rights of all human beings first of most is the right to life.
