Life: When does it begin?

[nkb]

This is an offshoot of a debate that was starting in the "Catholics vs Muslims" thread, about embryonic stem cell research and its moral implications, and when life begins, but didn't really belong.

When does life begin:

When the baby comes out of the womb (taking its first breath)?
When the baby in the womb is viable (able to live and breathe if it was taken out)?
When the sperm fertilizes the egg?
When the sperm and the egg are still separate, but, if combined, would create an embryo?
Is the sperm or the egg, individually, life?

Is embryonic stem cell harvesting immoral?

Please voice your opinion, and, obviously, try to back it up with some sort of reasonable logic that supports your position.

I've always believed that life begins when the baby is born. Until that time, it is nothing more than a parasite.

[Victus]

I can accept that once the organism is able to survive outside the mother, it is deemed human and awarded the appropriate rights.

[Choobus]

Life doesn't truly begin until you have done anal.

:lol::lol:

Life doesn't begin until I say it begins!

[antix]

Choobus wrote

Life doesn't truly begin until you have done anal.

:lol::lol:

By that, it is safe to say that abortions as late as the 54th trimester should be legal

[WITHTEETH]

I've heard that some scandinavian countries determine that life begins when the baby does not have to act as a parasite any longer. I believe the standard is something like 4.5 months(rough estimate). So that is more reasonable, and done with emprical evidence.

Theists believe life begins at conception like some soul enters the egg at that exact moment which is bullshit. Until they can show us this "soul" they have no grounds in their arguements. In fact the defintion of soul varies so much because there is no empirical evidence of a soul.

1) When the baby comes out of the womb (taking its first breath)

The reaon I wouldnt postpone calling an embryo life until this point is that the neonate is far more complex and developed neurologically than many other creatures we recognise as life.


2) When the baby in the womb is viable (able to live and breathe if it was taken out)?

Same as above



I would say that life begins when the sperm and egg fuse. From here a genetic program is set in motion that will , given the right environment in the uterus , produce a human. Of course , this is in no way human life. It is human life in the making. Sperm and eggs when separate are not "in the making". In a sense we remain "in the making" from the moment the sperm and egg fuse until our deaths and so it is difficult to know where to draw the line. We could say at gastrulation, when the 3 germ layers (ectoderm, mesoderm and endoderm) which eventually form the entire body are developed. We could say at neural induction , when the ectoderm becomes the neural plate and then the neural tube which slowly expands to build the central nervous system. We could say as soon as the embryonic heart starts beating. There are an endless series of crucial events that anyone could rationally argue are so fundamental to life that we must say life starts "here".


What is certain however is that an embryo taken at the 8-16 cell stage has no ability to process any information, let alone pain and suffering. There are already an excess of these embryos stagnating in the freezers of IVF clinics worldwide. To say it is immoral to use these is to me ridiculous. It is saying "it is immoral to use these embryos to potentially treat a plethora of human conditions that cause a lot of suffering, but perfectly moral to keep them at -80 degrees forever or incinerate them". So, these excess embryos are not potential life....bush and his cronies cannot token adopt them all.

Hopefully this (mainly religious) objection to stem cells will be over soon when people can take a cell from an embryo without destroying it. This was reported recently but is surronded by controversy. However I am hopeful that it will happen soon.

[Victus]

Down21 wrote

1) When the baby comes out of the womb (taking its first breath)

The reaon I wouldnt postpone calling an embryo life until this point is that the neonate is far more complex and developed neurologically than many other creatures we recognise as life.

Just because we recognize that a thing is alive does not mean we must keep it that way.

*eats bacon*

[Professor Chaos]

Victus wrote

I can accept that once the organism is able to survive outside the mother, it is deemed human and awarded the appropriate rights.

I'm with Victus.

The way I see it, this shouldn't even be an issue as far as stem cell research goes. Medically, pregnancy begins the moment the embryo implants itself in the uterine wall. Often, the embryo fails to attach and is lost naturally. It's not even a miscarriage--the mother has no idea when this event occurs, and the embryo is not missed. Until then, the embryo is just a clump of cells, the most "general" human cells available. These pre-implantation cells are the cells researchers are interested in. Using them isn't destroying a "potential" human life, since these cells have no chance of developing into a baby as long as they aren't allowed to implant on the uterine wall. They should be fair game.

[ghoulslime]

Choobus wrote

Life doesn't truly begin until you have done anal.

:lol::lol:

I'm pretty sure that anal is the beginning of life for Muslims. You cornhole some desert cunt and 9 minutes later she drops a little Muslim baby on the ground. Ah! Isn't it sweet!

Lifes begins... sometime before death does.

Victus wrote

I can accept that once the organism is able to survive outside the mother, it is deemed human and awarded the appropriate rights.

I agree, it's alive some months before it's born, that when you take it out of the womb it can breath and live on it's own, if only in a superficial sense. Though is it a person? I don't think it's a person until it's aware of itself. A baby learns through mimicing things around it, and will watch anything that moves. A few months afterward it will begin to choose what to watch. That's when I think it's a person.

[inkadu]

I'm with snap crafter. "Life" is a bullshit term. At what stage is a baby more alive than an adult pig? Are we talking intelligence? self awareness? consciousness? curiousity? Once we move away from our in-species preference, we are really effin stumped, because without that, we should be eating babies up to about 4 months old instead of bacon.

Where we decide when it's ok to kill babies is a social judgement mediated by our naturally evolved adoration of the cute little shitters.