Since a human being appears to only become self aware by the age of eighteen to twenty-four months after exiting the water world into the air world, would you extend the utilitarian use of these not yet self conscious beings to about seventeen months from birth into the air world?
If the scale you magically apply is consciousness, what is the magic moment when the organism becomes conscious? And a corollary: are the not yet self aware/self-conscious children less valuable than the children who have achieved awareness of the self?
Are you aware that life is a growth in complexity, from the will, then emotive, then self awareness/self consciousness?
Since dead souls are happy to disenfranchise a living organism (not organ, you lying mudpile, organism, because an embryonic individual is an ORGANISM) as it exhibits the will to live, and as it builds a brain ORGAN capable of emotive living for its consciousness, what is the magic date of the level of life we less enlightened should endorse protecting?
Word to readers of this post and thread: the person, exDemMom, to whom this is posted is claiming to be a pro-life conservative. She/he/it is nothing of the sort, as evidenced by the dead-soul support of leftist/progressive talking points used to defend embryo harvesting for experimentation and cloning research.
Her/his/its continued assertion that only scientific perspective is her/his/its basis for truth must not be ignored and thus given credulity, for the verdicts of science are a sliding scale determined by the authorities of each epoch, thus unedited by God's Grace in Christ.
For Pete’s sake, will you step back for a minute and look at your behavior? You aren’t acting very Christian. Furthermore, if you are truly pro-life—which I am beginning to doubt is your primary concern—you *must* be cognitive of the fact that the laws and attitudes towards abortion will never change based on someone’s religious opinion on what is a human *being*. You also won’t make much headway by calling people names and engaging in generally harassive behavior.
A major problem with using religious/philosophical criteria for trying to define a question best left to science is that there is no consistency in religious or philosophical views. Why should *your* opinion of the definition of a soul take precedence over the opinion of someone of a different religious faith? Assuming (which I don’t) that it is perfectly reasonable and valid to disregard actual observable and measurable physical characteristics, then why should *your* opinion of when a soul appears take precedence over the opinion of someone who believes that a soul does not appear until “quickening”, until the draw of the first breath, or until some other completely arbitrary point?
The beauty of science is that it is based on objective observation and is NOT subject to individual opinion. As I have already explained multiple times, the neural tube starts to fold during the 3rd week post-conception. Between weeks 3 and 5, the cells within that fold differentiate to form the brain and spinal cord. Since cells exhibit the behavior of their tissue-type as soon as they differentiate, it is reasonable to assume that these brain cells function as brain cells, communicating with each other and with the rest of the organism. We know, through a large body of research, that consciousness/the sense of self/personhood are manifested through brain activity, and that none of those exist in the absence of brain activity (hence, why thousands of people a day are declared dead on the basis of complete loss of brain function). We also know that of all the cell types that form the body, only the nervous system cells are permanent. Every other cell type dies and is replaced by newly differentiated cells originating from the body’s reservoirs of undifferentiated cells maintained for that purpose, on a regular basis. The durability of the nervous system tissues further supports the idea that a human life should be given legal protection once those tissues start to form, about 3 weeks after conception. While there is no reason to think that the level of awareness of a brain containing a handful of cells is anywhere close to that of a fetus of, e.g., 8 or 9 weeks, the consciousness continually grows in complexity and so there is no point at which one can say it is morally acceptable to snuff it out once it can be reasonably assumed to exist according to scientific objective criteria. Long story short, there is simply no basis for condemning the use of contraceptives, and your abusive behavior cannot change that fact.
I’ve already said this (and you did not even try to address it), but here it is again. Philosophically, there are many problems with the belief that conception—causes a soul to exist?—pulls a soul out of the ether? First, most fertilized ova don’t grow, don’t implant, or cease growing soon after implantation; only about 10 to 15% of them have the potential to form a fetus. Second, twins or even triplets can grow from a single fertilized ovum. Third, sometimes two zygotes fuse and go on to become one fetus with two genomes. Fourth, it is theoretically possible (and soon will be practicably possible) to induce embryogenesis from differentiated cells derived from a post-birth human. These facts all cause considerable difficulties for the “one conception one soul” paradigm. By that paradigm, you could ethically justify killing the “extras” for spare parts because they have no souls. Scientifically, there is no question about the personhood in any of these cases—one functional brain equals one person, regardless of the path embryogenesis took.
BTW, nice straw man you threw in about the utilitarian stuff.