Well the title my be a little misleading but please bear with me OH and FYI i am dyslexic and yes my spelling and grammer suck but to me its not so bad compaired to what it use to be like:) 
Anyways the thing im wanting to tell you all is the other i was over at my mates Gus’s house, and Will his house mate was there to and anyways i have been listing to a bunch of pod casts from P.O.I radio show and i knew Gus and Will are both catholics so i felt like picking a fight so off i go and say this and that about how i am over people bending over backwards to keep the church happy blah blah blah.
Well at some stage my conversation got into abortion.  Will asks me were do i stand on it and i said im not a woman its not my body you should maby try talking to a woman about it.  So i asked him were he thought life started and he said as soon and the sperm is in the egg!
Well i was like its not a person its a group of cells i dont think it has much of a life but anyways he got all cranky for some reason.
Well the reason he got cranky was i told him for a man who hasn’t "BEEN" with a woman for like the last decade maby he isnt the best person to be talking about women since he probably has forgotten what a woman even looks like LOL!.
Anyways im getting off track I said to him Dose he call the cement slab for a house a house? or dose he wait till everything is built and then its a house?  He got even more grumpy then said something rude to me and then went back to playing computer games in his bedroom.
SO this is how i see life i guess.  Being born is being alive and while your growing inside your mothers womb i guess your being built but your not alive but at the same time your not dead its kind of a real developing limbo.

So you got a cement slab for a house you know its gonna be a house one day but more stuff needs to happen yet.  And if you tore up the cement slab would it be considerd you destroyed a house?

Sorry this is my first real post and i know i can be a little confusing, i just felt like i needed to share my thoughts with you all

Cheers !!!
:twisted:

It’s a good analogy between a house and a person. I’d say that calling a cell at conception a ‘person’ is like calling the first brick laid down on the ground a ‘house’. Just as it’d be hard to say that a single brick constitutes a house (no front door, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, etc.), a single cell lacks all the features of a person (no heart, lungs, arms, legs, head, brain, nervous system, etc.)

:wink:

Sort of like the “paradox of the heap”.  Start with a heap of sand.  Take away one grain of sand.  Is it still a heap?  Of course it is.

Keep doing that, though, and eventually you come down to one grain of sand.  Is it STILL a heap?  Obviously not, but that’s the way anti-abortionists think! 

Exactly so, advocatus.

Life started billions of year ago and it has been a continuum ever since. Eggs and sperm are alive.

The problems comes in where people try to re-define reality to try and make our inherently amoral world moral.

This is the same issue with killing and eating animals.

People try to say that certain animals are “not conscious” in oder to make killing them to eat seem okay.

People try to define when “life” starts to make it okay to terminate the process before that point.

The reality is that pretty much every animal with a central nervous system is conscious, and life today doesn’t have a beginning, its a continuum, meaning that the eggs formed in every female are alive, and the sperm formed by every man are alive, and “potential human lives”.

The reality is that we live as part of an amoral system, in which morality is actually impossible to execute. Every “potential human life” cannot ever exist, the world would be overpopulated in a generation.

Yes, animals are conscious, and we kill them and we eat them. That’s the way that life is. We are committing murder every time we kill an animal to consume it, but that’s what the system of life is built on. Life is ultimately amoral, and that’s the struggle that people can’t get over.

We can’t solve the abortion debate by trying to define when life starts. That’s just a false premise. The real answer to the abortion issue is that yes, we are terminating humans lives, and thats’ just the way it is, and you have to accept it as that. Every time that a women has a period she is terminating human life. The reality is that in the past 100 years due to science, the human population of the planet has exploded and there are more people live today than almost all the people that have lived from 10,000 years ago until 1900. More people have a chance to live today than ever before, than would ever have that change under natural conditions.

If people want to bring God into it, why did God create such a violent and inhospitable system of life where most things naturally die before they reach maturity in the first place?

RR above said it very well.

To carry it a bit further, all animals are parasites or predators.  The only varieties of life that don’t kill other life are most plants. 

In addition, it seems to me that anyone who is actively against terminating pregnancies must also extend his/her actions to caring for the children that are born because of the prevented abortions.  I hear a lot of noise from the “right-to-lifers” but they are strangely silent after the child is born, can’t be cared for adequately and is likely to be damaged, to suffer, to die very early, to end up in prison.  But, that’s OK, just as long as the the abortion was prevented.

Occam

:D Thank for the views people!!!  Oh something to funny happend today i sware on my life this is no lie!  Today on the way to work my bus i was catching to work pulls up at traffic lights and there was a man holding picture of a fetus and the words on the image was something along the lines of Stop killing babies or something like that.  They often line the roads and show the cars as people pull up to the lights here in Brisbane.

Anyways as we pulled up at the lights i opend the window on the bus and said in a very dead pan voice “They are all just bircks and concreat slabs IT’S NOT EVEN A HOUSE!!!!”  LOL

He gave me the most priceless look he had a real WTF? kinda look about him!  Sorry but i though you mite like to know cause i found it to funny and it was just great timing of this post. Oh whenever i get chance to hassle a right to lifer or a churchie i like to confuse them! :oops:  Sorry my bad people

[quote author=“rationalrevolution”]Eggs and sperm are alive.

Bingo.

While all the above is true and interesting, the more reasonable argument I hear for “life starts at conception” has to do with the existance of the new DNA that is unique to the new life.

The non-unique DNA status of identical twins is just accepted as mysterious and fantastic: two souls linked forever - how wonderful and mysterious!

(my own best argument is to define the conditions present at the point when life ends and apply the same standard to the beginning.  At the end of life, I can usually acheive an agreement that at least some brain activity is essential in order for a person to be considered still alive , then I apply the same reasoning to the beginning of life.)

—Riley

[quote author=“Riley”]While all the above is true and interesting, the more reasonable argument I hear for “life starts at conception” has to do with the existance of the new DNA that is unique to the new life.

That’s an interesting twist, however, then they have to get rid of the word “life” and substitute it with “an individual”.  Of course, we then have to decide what defines an individual, only DNA or personality, thoughts, and experiences.

If we accept identical twins as being different individuals then that weakens the DNA argument.  If we don’t, then if one twin committed a capital offense this reasoning would seem to have us put both of them to death.

Occam

[quote author=“Occam”]Of course, we then have to decide what defines an individual, only DNA or personality, thoughts, and experiences.

Occam

Isn’t personality usually just a product of thoughts and experiences?

Isn’t individuality just a product of thoughts and experiences? 

They are all linked, however, I was trying to show that defining life as only unique DNA is not particularly reasonable.

Occam

[quote author=“Occam”]Isn’t individuality just a product of thoughts and experiences? 

They are all linked, however, I was trying to show that defining life as only unique DNA is not particularly reasonable.

Occam

We agree.

a sperm and egg might be alive but they’re not ‘concious’ nor do they ‘suffer’.

the right to lifers could give a flying hoot about suffering in this world, all they care about is suffering in the next.

Wouldn’t god be the most prolific abortionist ever? But thats not true unless you can prove a god   drum roll!

Where to draw the line… I’ve read some Scandinavia generally draws the line where a baby no longer needs to become a parasite, and can live outside the mothers womb.

But on a more general term, id draw the line at life beginning with the first cell about 4 billion years ago. Excuse me, :shock:  i have to stop a grasshopper from having an abortion!!!