"There is no "when". Death is not an instantaneous event. It is a continuous process. It involves billions of chemical events over a period of time."
Fair enough. So you're saying that a person who commits murder isn't guilty of murder because the victim isn't really dead? I didn't think so.
Your original statement -- life has no beginning or end, or something similar -- is a red herring in the abortion debate. Even if Life (with a capital "L") has no beginning or end, from a legal, social, and moral standpoint human life (small "l") does have a beginning and an end.
Costello: Fair enough. So you're saying that a person who commits murder isn't guilty of murder because the victim isn't really dead? I didn't think so.
Ah! I can help you here. You are not cognizant of the concept of a continuum. Disparate regions of a continuum ARE quite different even though near regions of a continuum are NOT significantly different. That is the definition of a continuum.
The process of human death (like nearly all biologic processes) falls along a continuum where in one region you are most certainly alive, and in another you are most certainly dead. However, near regions in that continuum involve billions of quite similar cellular events involving even smaller molecular events such as calcium transport. On that scale, one can find no meaningful dividing time point between life and death.
Your original statement -- life has no beginning or end, or something similar -- is a red herring in the abortion debate. Even if Life (with a capital "L") has no beginning or end, from a legal, social, and moral standpoint human life (small "l") does have a beginning and an end.
I don't know what you mean with your capitalization. Of course the law routinely sets necessarily arbitrary dividing points along continua as a practical matter. However, this should not be confused with any real understanding of the underlying process.
While I agree it's a red herring in one sense, it's not in another. While the pro-life side claims that "life begins at conception" (they actually mean "fertilization" most of the time and they aren't the same thing), there are plenty on the pro-choice side who like to claim that the unborn aren't alive yet. I think this point helps shed light on the fact that there is never a moment when an unborn child is not alive.
The key questions are (A) When is a new "individual" created? (fertilization is one point, but so is twinning and the fantasy science fiction "cloning" where one person steps into a machine and two people step out), (B) When does that individual become a "person" and attain protection from being killed?, and (C) Is the hardship of compelling women to remain pregnant against their will significant enough to counter the claims that an unborn child has to life. The primary debate revolves around (B) and (C), though some answers to (B) bring (A) into play.