Your opinion on abortion ?

Chuz Life: Basically I'm under contract with my host never to distribute content that meets certain conditions. Almost all hosts have such a clause. If Facebook owns their own servers they can distribute what they like, but since I'm running edeb8 on, like, $70 per year, it's not that simple. So that's where the legal requirement comes from.

99.99% of the time, nobody will care if something is put up even briefly. If, however, somebody stumbles along such content and informs the host, edeb8 could be shut down forever, instantly. The host doesn't care, they're paid already. In fact a troll who wanted to shut down edeb8 could, in theory, post something really bad, tell the site host and get the site shut down while I'm out shopping or something. This is why I need to take such a tough stand on this stuff.

"Preview" buttons exist now so people can check their formatting before posting.

admin: Even in late stages of pregnancy you don't have a BREATHING entity. And you certainly don't have consciousness.

either "BREATHING" nor consciousness are requirements for personhood. There are plenty of human beings (persons) who can not "breathe" on their own and who are not conscious. My wife, for example - when she was in her coma. She was still a "person" and still entitled to the equal protections under our laws. . . Even when she had only a fraction of the prognosis that a typical child in the womb might have.

Furthermore, we have court cases where children born with ONLY a brain stem being recognized as human beings/ persons and they have no capacity for consciousness or to breathe on their own. . . Ever!

Chuz Life: either "BREATHING" nor consciousness are requirements for personhood
I actually agree. Physical traits do not describe either life or personhood.

BIOLOGY is the "study of LIFE."
Sure, but for biology to then discover what life means on that basis is circular reasoning. Science works off axioms. The definition of life is one of them for biology.

You made the claim that the child is "part of" the mother's body.
Sure. In the same way a cancerous cell is part of its host's body, but a separate living thing, so too is a child in the womb part of its hosts body, but also a separate living thing. The two are not exclusive.

THEY.
I use the term to denote the ambiguous case - I don't think English has a word like this that can be used as both a singular and a plural, and given that the object I'm describing is an ambiguous case I considered it the most relevant word. My apologies if I was wrong.

Even if any attempt to separate them would or could kill one or both of them?
Generally my understanding is this is not true of twins who don't share much of their body. The less is shared, the less complicated it usually is. Regardless I would indeed consider their ability to be separated to be one of the relevant factors in determining how much to treat them as one person. An obvious case in point would be the death penalty. If one twin dies when conjoined, the other usually dies soon after of shock. Even sending one of the twins to prison is impossible when not separated. Not that I think the law is the be all and end all of what defines an individual, but it's something to look to.

All the scientific sources that I have found refer to the events that take place following fertilization as simple cell division. The only mentioning of mutations is when something goes wrong.
Ok, but that's following fertilization. Fertilization itself is a mutative process, because new genes are formed that were not there before (and I might add, every once in a while a subsequent mutation is actually beneficial, this being the idea behind natural selection).

admin: Physical traits do not describe either life or personhood.

Yes. They do.

The legal definitions for a "person" is "a human being" or "the body of a human being."

So, those ARE the physical traits that are required for that legal term.

for biology to then discover what life means on that basis is circular reasoning. Science works off axioms. The definition of life is one of them for biology.

Why are you trying to change the subject? Your claim was that science "certainly doesn't define terms such as life." I showed you that it does. So now you are shifting the topic to the "meaning" of life?

Why are you being so evasive? There is no need for that.

In the same way a cancerous cell is part of its host's body, but a separate living thing, so too is a child in the womb part of its hosts body, but also a separate living thing. The two are not exclusive.

I find it a bit odd that you have gone from your prior claim that science can not define "life" to an acknowledgement of the fact that a child in the womb is a "separate living thing." You are correct when you say that a cancer cell is a "living thing" too. However, a cancer cell is not a separate living organism and a child in the womb is. So, your comparison of (and your attempt to equate) the two of them is dubious at best.

Fertilization itself is a mutative process, because new genes are formed that were not there before

That is neither the definition nor the criteria for a "genetic mutation." We can not have a dialogue on this if either one (or both) of us can just make things up as we go along.

Mutations are a "a sudden departure from the parent type in one or more heritable characteristics." Conceptions are not considered to be mutations unless and until that deviation (departure from the norm) takes place.

Chuz Life: The legal definitions for a "person" is "a human being" or "the body of a human being." So, those ARE the physical traits that are required for that legal term.

Sure, and I'd disagree with those laws. To give an example, the Nazis got around this by calling non-Aryans subhuman, ie not worthy of personhood and not human beings in the Aryan sense. In a similar way you probably see me as weaseling my way into abortion-supportiveness by simply not agreeing that foetuses are human beings yet. All creatures naturally go through different stages of development and where exactly it becomes a separate creature is a matter of interpretation at best. Which is why this particular legal definition falls short when it comes to issues like abortion and genocide, and presumably, that makes it problematic for both of us. As you yourself said, physical traits such as consciousness or breathing should not define personhood (see, like, your post just before this one).

I showed you that it does.
No you didn't. You showed it depends on it. Not that it defines it. Words in general are socially defined and accepted. They are almost never scientifically defined - even, like, names of new species go through an approval process and occasionally do get rejected.

So now you are shifting the topic to the "meaning" of life?
I don't think I am. I just think your earlier idea of "well science says the unborn are people" is a misguided idea of what science is there for. Science doesn't say anything about things like that. It assumes them and uses that to find out more information. It can describe things about unborn people. For example, science tells us the unborn have hearts. But it doesn't tell us that this means they are people.

I find it a bit odd that you have gone from your prior claim that science can not define "life" to an acknowledgement of the fact that a child in the womb is a "separate living thing."
Yes, but let's be clear. Science did not define the term living here. I'm using a word which, like all words, was socially constructed. Our notions of life are based entirely on what we experience here on Earth. So sure, mother and unborn child can be separated as life forms, though this tends to kill the unborn child. It relies on its host. Plenty of organisms do, but the separation is artificial. Science can tell us that. But science did not determine that this is what makes it a living thing. I strongly maintain that unborn children are more part of their mother's body than they are independant, at least until birth. A lot of really cool things happen at birth. It's pretty amazing just how much switches over inside a child's system when that happens.

However, a cancer cell is not a separate living organism and a child in the womb is
To be classified as an organism, something needs to be able to function completely independently. Human organisms need oxygen to survive independently. A foetus cannot breathe. QED.

All you're doing here is replacing life with organism and pretending like it's a different point. Just like a cancer cell or gut bacteria, a foetus relies almost totally on its mother's conditions to survive.

Mutations are a "a sudden departure from the parent type in one or more heritable characteristics." Conceptions are not considered to be mutations unless and until that deviation (departure from the norm) takes place.
It's not a departure from the norm, it's from the parent type.

Is the new child cell different from both parents? Yes. Therefore it is a departure.
Is it sudden? Yes.
Are the changed characteristics heritable? Yes.

I'm not making this up. Conception fits perfectly.