When Is There A Functioning Integrated Whole Human Being?

FreeRepublic ^ | 6/13/2003 | Marvin Galloway

[FITZ]

unable to implant and consequently die?

Some people die before they implant, some die before they're born, some die shortly after birth, some die before kindergarden, some before they turn 21, some before age 30.... natural death is just part of life but doesn't justify killing someone.

[MHGinTN]

Well said ... I've been pondering how to say that to my friend, supercat. Your response was not clumsy the way mine would have been.

[Havisham]

I didn't think anywhere near 90% of fertilized eggs implanted successfully, even in healthy women. Certainly there are some women who, because of natural conditions, have much lower implantation rates. Should such women be forbidden from having sex, on the basis that it might fertilize an egg which might be unable to implant and consequently die?

Although I cannot offer a citation for the 90% number, I believe it is essentially correct. Chemical birth control, the pill, and surgical birth control, abortion, are human interventions that destroy the embryonic person. By your rhetorical question, do you mean to equate human action to conceive a child with human intervention to prevent a live birth just so long as the outcome is same? If so, we are not having a serious discussion.

[Havisham]

Yes, it is the central connundrum to agree upon when an individual human being is worthy of protection, hence the effort to expose the biological realities of prenatal life. The issue bears also upon how our society will deal with embryonic exploitation and cloning.

Thank you for your affirmative comment. Would you agree that requiring a life to be fully functional and whole has obvious implications for protection of the infirm and elderly?

[MHGinTN]

Please go to the first repsonse on this thread and click on the link to the essay that preceeded this one (more depth on the organ harvesting 'death protocol'). The elderly and infirm fit the clear protocol definition of functioning integrated whole for the title of human being. It is the author's contention that the same is fitting for the embryonic indiividual.

[Havisham]

Thank you for the tip. I did read the article, however, I recoiled at its complicating of the issue. Essays of this type are often overlong and wordy, which I believe repels the average person, whom I count myself among. Complexification of the truth of life only makes a rapidly approaching utilitarian future more likely.

[MHGinTN]

^

[Jeff Gordon]

A newborn is only slightly more self-reliant than a pre-born.

I agree with that. A human candidate does not really become a fully functional being until around the age of 32 years.

[donmeaker]

When my wife was attending medical school 5-7 years ago the implantation rate was only 75 percent.

As far as integration of the entire organism, I am convinced that most Liberal Democrats are not there yet. Accordingly it would be legal to perform abortion upon demand at any time after their participation in their first election.

[cgk]

ping...

[Terriergal]

When Is There A Functioning Integrated Whole Human Being?

When it is wanted.

:-(

[MHGinTN]

And that, Terriergal, is why the mebryonic and early fetal individual human beings will be exploited for their valuable body parts, killing them off in the process of cannibalizing them ... the notion of 'if it's wanted' at once dehumanizes the unwanted and denegrates the species to cannibalism.

[MHGinTN]

The first necessity for survival by the embryo when it implants via its personally constructed placental encapsulation is oxygen ... the placenta functions as the 'lungs' for the embryo, from one perspective. The oxygen doesn't start getting to the embryo right away, but it is soon after implantation arriving through the blood supply the embryo has chemically induced to be delivered to the encapsulating placental barrier.

[aruanan]

There is a time during the earliest age of an individual’s lifetime when just having a central processor working the nerve feedback loop is not sufficient to define the organism as alive in the air world because until approximately 20 to 22 weeks following the beginning of the individual’s lifetime, the organs called lungs are not complete enough to sustain respiration, even with the central processor working perfectly.

This, of course, is nonsense on its face since it's making "alive" depend on "alive means being able to breath air". There is no such definition that is not merely ad hoc for argument's sake.

Here is something that puts it all into the perspective you apparently wanted in many fewer words:

Genetically speaking, there is a time before which an individual of a sexually reproducing species does not exist and after which it does, be it ever so humble. From that moment to the moment of its dissolution it passes through definable stages of development and degeneration. Here are some that apply to us: zygote, embryo, fetus, newborn, infant, toddler, child, pre-adolescent, young adult, mature adult, old-aged. Upon this continuum of development place an asterisk where “it” becomes “human” and perhaps another where its humanity ceases as far as the empirical world is concerned. Many would place the asterisks at conception and death (death defined as the irreversible disruption of the continuum). I do. For us, it is this creature appearing at conception and disappearing at death that is human. Against this, talk about seeds not being trees and fertilized eggs not being chickens shows itself for the silly ontogenocentrism that it is-- the full-grown chicken is not a fertilized egg, but both are developmental stages of the same being. An acorn is not a tree, but both are equally oak.

If “human being” is a later stage of an individual’s existence, then what is the name for the being started at conception and ended at death? On the individual level, the pro-life group calls it human whether conscious or not, crippled, retarded, senile, diseased, sinful, intelligent, female, or male. The pro-abortion group uses “quality of life and “value to society” to define the parameters of being human and those who have the power to do so to define those terms, whether a woman and her physician, N.A.R.A.L, or Big Brother.

[MHGinTN]

I guess I'm just not capable of writing that succinctly. ... And I wanted to focus upon the essentials of the protocol used when organ harvesting is anticipated with older human beings, to determine when there is no longer an integrated whole functioning human organism 'there' or here, or ... well, see, I just can't be so succinct, aruanan. [My 'hidden agenda' is to define the reason, biologically, for protecting individual human embryonic life from exploitative measures.]