The fact is life and death surround us. A single bacteria is roughly as amazing as all the rest of the cosmos combined (as far as we've seen). Each human egg and sperm contain great potential, if only the conditions are right, if only they combine with their environment in the right way. Yet death is everywhere. The miracle of life is destroyed so elsewhere it can thrive.
I'm not convinced losing a single human egg, fertilized though it may be, is especially tragic. At some point it is worth protecting with force and violence (because that's what we're debating in this thread), but not when it's only a few cells.
Indeed, and in the United States, it is a crime for a mother or father (or even most random adults) to neglect a child.
The kidney argument is often used to make the case that a woman should not have to carry a child. However, this argument falls flat.
If you find an abandoned child, you actually... have to take care of it. If you don't, you can be imprisoned. If you're the parent, you'll be imprisoned for even longer. You have a basic duty to care for children, even if not a parent.
> I'm not convinced losing a single human egg, fertilized though it may be, is especially tragic.
I can find a lot of people whose death I would not find particularly tragic. The law -- thank goodness -- doesn't follow the whims of anon291.
We might have record of it happening once for humans in some holy writ, though the baby was considered male, which if genetically male would be impossible for parthenogenesis but not necessarily if the case were simply phenotypically male (like a female hyena). Certainly that story is more common in the US than other similarly derived folklore and myths, like Athena (female, so parthenogenesis is a potential).
She is in the Greek mythos and was worshipped by many. Historical enough for divinity claims, should I be interested in her patronage as a mortal. We can probably find a suitable historical figure to attach that divinity to. Maybe Mary Magdalene from the New Testament, she is already considered somewhat divine in the apocrypha (Christian holy writ arbitrarily not included in the Bible of mostly similar concurrency). Maybe even tie Canaanite and Greek pantheons back together through Asherah.
> Parthenogenesis occurs naturally in some plants, some invertebrate animal species (including nematodes, some tardigrades, water fleas, some scorpions, aphids, some mites, some bees, some Phasmatodea and parasitic wasps) and a few vertebrates (such as some fish, amphibians, reptiles and very rarely birds). This type of reproduction has been induced artificially in a few species including fish, amphibians, and mice.
Happens in vertebrates. Hasn't been observed among primates quite yet, but give it time and proper data capture. Thus why mythology (oral embedding of odd events preserved by religious contexts) could provide a single meta-observation in the stories of virgins giving birth.
You then asked for a historical Athena -- not sure why you wanted to go that direction but guessed you wanted to go off topic -- so I went with it.
You're trying to make the point of "can't happen" that eggs self-fertilize. We know they do, though, among vertabrates. That we haven't observed it in humans means one of three hypotheses: (1) it is impossible, (2) it is rare, (3) we don't capture the observation (perhaps the fetuses all miscarry, thus requiring abortion as a medical procedure).
Is there somebody out there I could read who argues that the ethical responsibility to carry a pregnancy to term begins at the moment of egg fertilization, who doesn't also personally believe that extramarital sex and/or birth control are sinful? I am genuinely interested in being proven wrong about my characterization of people who argue for fertilized-egg-morality. I have questions for them, like "how far into the egg must the sperm penetrate before it becomes an ethically significant entity?" and "do documented cases of parthenogenesis in humans indicate that all eggs are ethically significant entities as well?"
Sorry, I vehemently disagree. I remember my parents explaining abortion to me as a child, and I thought it was pretty barbaric. My parents are less 'pro-life' than I am.
> criminalizing birth control.
Personally, I don't use birth control, because I think it's too dangerous.
> Is there somebody out there I could read who argues that the ethical responsibility to carry a pregnancy to term begins at the moment of egg fertilization,
Sure. Christopher Hitchens was pro-life. There are entire secular organizations. Actually 12% of all pro-lifers have no religious affiliation: https://secularprolife.org/2019/07/the-religious-diversity-o...
There are even leftist orgs who engage in 'direct action', like pro-life Antifa: https://paaunow.org/. Not my cup of tea, since I typically disagree with leftist approaches to argumentation, even though we'd agree in this case. Here's their manifesto (https://paaunow.org/stances). They don't believe extramarital sex is wrong in a moral sense.
Honestly, most of the pro-life movement is not Catholic. Most evangelical and Protestant churches believe BC is fine. Many evangelical churches are okay with extra marital sex.
I'm not saying children aren't inclined to be repulsed by abortion, I'm saying they wouldn't empathize with a fertilized embryo any more than they'd empathize with a sperm cell. In fact they're probably a lot more likely to empathize with the sperm cell since it's moving around.
> Personally, I don't use birth control, because I think it's too dangerous.
I don't think I understand this.
> Sure. Christopher Hitchens was pro-life.
Thank you for this, it was interesting hearing his perspective. I really dislike his perspective, but it's interesting to hear anyway; it's the sort of example I was looking for.
What I dislike is how totally definitional his position seems. We musn't destroy fertilized embryos because they are humans, and they are humans because... we are defining humans to be fertilized embryos and beyond? Why not ask the question in the first place: Why is it wrong to kill? If it's because of the lost potential life that would have been lived had the killing not occurred, then we must outlaw all forms of birth control. If it's because of the termination of the neurological functions of a human or human-like brain, then there's nothing wrong with destroying embryos. But what is the ethical argument for the cutoff being fertilization? "Potential life" clearly does not work; potential lives are prevented all the time. "Imminent life" doesn't work either; sperm on their way to an egg are imminent life until they hit latex. The moment when "the chromosomes of the male and female pronuclei blend in the oocyte" is very interesting, but so are many other stages that precede it and follow it. I don't see why that stage strikes an ethical chord except in the minds of people who can't separate arbitrary term definition from reality.
What if we defined sexual intercourse this way? Let's find the biological moment where sexual intercourse has technically occurred, and rest our moral judgement on that biological definition. So, for example, rape with a condom is a whole separate class of crime, because sexual intercourse never occurred. Nevermind that the real impact to thinking, feeling people is almost totally disconnected from that specific biological definition we've picked.
In addition to my questions from the previous comment, here's another thing I'd ask Christopher Hitchens (if he were still alive) or those who agree with him on this subject: Is it wrong to have sex with a woman born with a condition that allows her eggs to be fertilized, but leaves no chance for them to ever implant, thereby invariably killing one or two fertilized "humans" every month she has sex? Or, in abstract terms: Is it really the fertilized embryo entity that we care about? Or is it in fact the imminent life? And if it is the imminent life, then why is pulling out okay (or is it)?
You are writing this as if this is not something we already do. Not in the way you mentioned, but in many states and jurisdictions outside America, rape refers to vaginal penetration with a penis. This is an attempt to define sexual intercourse. Other sexual crimes are classified differently (either as sodomy or sexual assault). This is not because these other crimes aren't equally terrible emotionally, but because PIV rape can cause a child, which is considered worse to do without consent.
> In addition to my questions from the previous comment, here's another thing I'd ask Christopher Hitchens (if he were still alive) or those who agree with him on this subject: Is it wrong to have sex with a woman born with a condition that allows her eggs to be fertilized, but leaves no chance for them to ever implant, thereby invariably killing one or two fertilized "humans" every month she has sex? Or, in abstract terms: Is it really the fertilized embryo entity that we care about? Or is it in fact the imminent life? And if it is the imminent life, then why is pulling out okay (or is it)?
I imagine it would be the same as his answer to generic trolley problem questions.
But again, you asked for one example. I gave you one. There's actually plenty of secular pro-lifers, modern, old, etc. You should perhaps read more before just pretending it's a primarily religious position. Ultimately, the Christian position on this (best explained by the Catholic church) comes from Aristotelian ethics, not a particularly Christian worldview, or even one that requires scripture to defend. Almost every pro-life defense rests on the simple claim that a fertilized egg is human and has particular rights. Perhaps the only 'religious' claim the Catholics make is that humans have rights independent of the status of their brains, because humans are made in the image of God. But frankly, if we were to reject that claim, we would be forced to reject the enlightenment ideals this country and secular liberalism were founded upon (most secular philosophers make little attempt to defend why humans have rights in the first place).
By your own link, it's an overwhelmingly religious position. If you look at the issue globally it becomes even more obvious just how religious it is. I'm interested in the exceptions because they are relatively rare.
> Almost every pro-life defense rests on the simple claim that a fertilized egg is human and has particular rights.
Yes, this is exactly the problem. It takes the implications of "human" in well-established ethical systems and attempts to insert the definition of "human specimen" from modern biology. That's not a valid move. Ethicists didn't have embryos in mind when they discussed things like divine rights and deontology.
I'm glad you brought up Aristotle, because he himself wrote on this subject:
"...but when couples have children in excess, let abortion be procured before sense and life have begun; what may or may not be lawfully done in these cases depends on the question of life and sensation."[0]
Aristotle didn't understand the specifics of embryos or implantation, but he was clearly capable of observing that there were stages very early in pregnancy where the thing growing did not yet have sensation, and then further stages where it had sensation but not the sensation of being human. This is astoundingly accurate; props to him.
Applying modern biological definitions to the established ethics of old is anachronistic. You can't just look to the letter of the ancient law and swap definitions from modern, unrelated fields and expect the intent to survive.
If you know of a case of a conscious haploid human being please inform us now