I meant to suggest that the presence or absence of a heartbeat was a pretty stupid way of distinguishing whether we are talking about a person- If your heart is stopped during surgery, are you not a person? If your head is severed, but you body is put on a respirator to keep the organs fresh for transplant, are you still alive? Is the body a person?
I can see that ---besides other life forms have a heartbeat ---DNA testing would show that we're talking about a human. As far as when life begins ---the mother wouldn't have to have it killed if it wasn't living.
don't worry. Im sure most freepers knew what you meant. I had a similar problem with some freepers on another thread who didn't read my comments in context. Have we lowered the freeper entrance exam standards lately ?
You were first an individual human being at your individual conception and first cell division. Your lifetime as an organism (not to be confused with an organ) started the continuum that is your individual human life when the gametes of your parents united. The zygote is an organism, with body parts, growing and thus expressing its individual human life. To miss this critical truth is to open the door to the utility of exploiting these earliest aged human beings, while wrongfully casting aside the truth of the cannibalism in the process of that exploitation. The embryo is an human being. Its stem cells are its body parts, even before the manifestation of organs can be differentiated in the individual human organism. To kill the embryo in order to harvest its body parts for use in treating another, older organism is as much cannibalism as treating an individual's illness by having the patient eat the embryo(s). The only way to stand against that cannibalism is by acknowledging the embryological truth that the embryo is an individual human being in its earliest age of a lifetime, a continuum of individual human life begun at conception.