It is difficult for an ongoing business (or an investor) to go bankrupt without debt.
- Manlobbi
Halls of Shrewd'm / US Policy❤
No. of Recommendations: 5
How do proponents of "fetal personhood" and "life begins at conception" handle identical twins? Identical twins have the same exact DNA. The formation of the twins happens AFTER conception, so clearly, the fusing of the sperm with the egg could not be the cause of "ensoulment".
From
https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/identical...Identical twins (also called monozygotic twins) result from the fertilization of a single egg by a single sperm, with the fertilized egg then splitting into two. Identical twins share the same genomes and are always of the same sex. In contrast, fraternal (dizygotic) twins result from the fertilization of two separate eggs with two different sperm during the same pregnancy. They share half of their genomes, just like any other siblings. Fraternal twins may not be of the same sex or have similar appearances.
No. of Recommendations: 4
Clearly, "ensoulment" doesn't occur at conception. This has been known for a long time, for the reasons you explain.
It is really tricky to declare when "human life" begins. Sperm are alive. Ova are alive. The Catholics used to believe masturbation was a sin because it killed babies (more or less...I'm not familiar with the papal details). But that originated in a time when it was believed that men "planted the seed", and women were the "fertile soil". They didn't know about DNA, and contributions from both parents. Today, if a we regard an ovum as "human life" then menstruation is killing babies. I'm not sure how the Catholics regard masturbation today.
Once it is an implanted embryo, it gets a little trickier. It has the DNA of a full human (barring anomalies). But is it a person? It doesn't yet have a brain (and won't for pretty much the first trimester).
Albaby hates my argument, but I view it in a somewhat legalistic framework. If it's not human life, then everything else is moot. If it is, then we have enshrined in our Constitution that no person may force another into servitude. A woman carrying a baby is certainly in servitude, providing all the needs of the fetus. If she's willing, no problem. If she's not, then anti-abortion laws are forcing her into servitude. While the authors of the Reconstruction Amendments didn't explicitly have this in mind, they also wrote those Amendments sufficiently generally that they (IMHO...IANAL) should apply if we are declaring the fetus to be a person.
So either way, we should not be banning abortion. Fetal personhood doesn't really get abortion foes anywhere, IMO.
No. of Recommendations: 0
Clearly, "ensoulment" doesn't occur at conception. This has been known for a long time, for the reasons you explain.
And for like reasons, it can't be true that DNA alone makes a human unique, and thereby "endowed" with a unique "soul" (whatever that is). Consider human cloning. I don't think that process is perfected yet, but as soon as it is, every somatic cell of the trillions that make up a grown human has the potential to grow into a fully-formed human. And so, if a fertilized egg has a soul worthy of being granted full human rights, then so does every somatic cell.
No. of Recommendations: 1
every somatic cell of the trillions that make up a grown human has the potential to grow into a fully-formed human. And so, if a fertilized egg has a soul worthy of being granted full human rights, then so does every somatic cell.
This is easy to counter: As long as you don't know what a "soul" is and by "whom" or "what" it is given you can't know what "his" selection process and criteria are to "give" souls to entities. "He/It" might even say simply "Sorry, no souls for cloned humans!".
Your arguments are coming from a purely mechanistic view of the world, which a believer in souls must not necessarily share - - - as you yourself apparently do not share his belief in a "soul" and therefore put it in Apostrophs. Mixing this up, pretending what you don't believe in and saying "If there were souls...", and then trying to falsify it by now arguing mechanistically "....then biology/physics says..." does not work.
No. of Recommendations: 3
Your arguments are coming from a purely mechanistic view of the world, which a believer in souls must not necessarily share
No, my arguments come from a purely rational view of the world, which a believer in souls ipso facto doesn't share. 😊
