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I disagree that I am trying to subvert or alter what it means to be human. There is SIGNIFICANT debate about what rights the unborn have, and at what time they are accorded those rights. I am pro-life to an extent, but find arguments that a fertilized egg is a human being ridiculous. We all make distinctions, as we must in an imperfect world. We make them during war, we make them when advocating(possibly) the use of higher order mammals in medical experimentation and we make them during the development of life in the womb.

Women suffer from miscarriages all the time, and often the sense of loss corresponds more to visions of a future rather than the miscarriage itself. It also depends on how far in the gestation period the woman finds herself. This roughly corresponds to the increasing rights and value accorded a fetus and then a baby during pregnancy.

The problem with defining a human being as SIMPLY a fertilized human egg is that it excludes other considerations. An exemplar of this moral quandary is the debate over the anencephalic baby nearly a decade ago. The parents wanted to give the organs to needy babies as there was no hope for a future human life from their child, but the court blocked this action and the baby died along with those awaiting its organs.

The principal matter in that case was that the baby was INCAPABLE of EVER developing into a real human being, as it lacked a brain. This was not a retarded child, or even a comatose one, but one that was incapable of being self-aware at ANY point.

So what ARE the criteria for protecting a life? Certainly we can agree that butchering a cat for fun is wrong. But is advancing cancer research using cats, sometimes causing their death, wrong? Is an egg or embryo worthy of MORE protection than chimpanzees? Certainly the great apes are capable of self-awareness, as whales and dolphins seem to be. Can we still justify causing their deaths for our benefit and if so, what makes them less worthy of protection than a human embryo?

If possessing human genetic material is the baseline, then we set ourselves up for genocidal wars against other forms of intelligent life in the universe, for they will lack such material and as such, other criteria must be taken into account or their use and exploitation will be justified.