[weikel]

A blastoclyst is alive the same way a single celled organism is alive. Alive technically, but it doesn't feel pleasure or pain, think, learn, or have even a rudimentary self awareness the way humans do. Its merely undiferentiated tissue in the process of running some genetic and chemical instructions which will eventually turn it into a human being if all goes well.

[MHGinTN]

A blastoclyst is alive the same way a single celled organism is alive. No, there is a significant difference. I will assume you have read the posts previous to this one and go from there. A single-celled organism is at its final age for a single-celled organism. [Just for clarity: the organism is made of its organs and/or organelle. The first cell of the human organism divides during growth and development, taking that ORGANISM through a myriad of ages.] A single-celled organism is precisely the first age of many, many ages of the individual human lifetime. That is significant fact you appear to choose to ignore, thus lending a certain hollowness to your further comments.

Alive technically, but it doesn't feel pleasure or pain, think, learn, or have even a rudimentary self awareness the way humans do. Is it not yet apparent to you and anyone reading these comments that what you are defending is the termination of the human lifetime begun at conception? You defend the arbitrary assignment of less worthy because of the age attained along a continuum hallmarked by form and function of the human organism, I suppose, simply because you want these individual humans cannibalized prior to their reaching the arbitrary point that you would stamp them worthy of reaching other ages along the continuum.

It's merely undiferentiated tissue in the process of running some genetic and chemical instructions which will eventually turn it into a human being, if all goes well. That is surely one of the most obtuse defenses of cannibalism I've ever read! "... if all goes well" is to be raised in defense of making certain all does not go well for the individual conceived life, so that that individual may be exploited for its body parts. An interesting turn in defense of modern cannibalism, I grant you that.