All cells contain the potential to develop into the organism which it came from.
"One of my law teachers used to talk about the ideological power of categories. Move the baby from “child” to “embryo,” and suddenly you can kill him with impunity."
Skin cells can be cloned. How does they fit into the professor's irrational catagory scheme?
"with murderous consequences"
A petri dish full of embryos is not a pool of people and an unwanted embryo is not a person. For an embryo to be called a person, their parents must make that designation. No one else has the right to do so.
A petri dish full of embryos is not a pool of people and an unwanted embryo is not a person. For an embryo to be called a person, their parents must make that designation. No one else has the right to do so.
When an intermediate premise assumes the conclusion, we have circular reasoning. Highly irrational.
Translated to expose the circle, you appear to be saying that a very young human life is not capable of being defined as protectable human life except by older human life which has already been designated as protectable human life by other human lives that have also been designated as protectable human life AND capable of judging the protectability of human life by yet other human life deemed as protectable human life by (insert infinite regression here) ....
Confused reasoning at its finest. You are begging the question of what human life is, deferring answering of that question to an infinite regression which never answers it. As Spock would say, highly illogical.
Do you seriously not see the huge hole you're falling into here?
If an embryo is not a person until her parents say so, then she got her status as a human person from other humans. Once some humans get to decide when and if other humans are really humans, powerful humans will want to take that mantle on themselves ... if parents get to play God, then politicians will want to play God, too.
And they'll want it in regard to people who already born, not just people who are in the womb. People who are inconvenient ... the wrong race, the wrong religion, the wrong set of political views.
That's called "tyranny" and "genocide," and it flows inevitably from the logic of abortion.
God calls them people, and this remains true whether idiots such as yourself like it or not.