Abortion debate thread

Zombrex wrote: »

Correct. But the sperm and egg together are an entire genome. So why not consider the sperm and egg pair a person if the zygote is considered a person based on unique DNA.

Good question.

Obvious the answer is that humans have a hard time thinking of a "person" as being made up of two objects unconnected to each other. But that is our issue with how we conceptualize people (interestingly we don't have trouble thinking of a persons mind as something separate to the body), not a biological reality. The sperm and egg pairing have the same DNA as the zygote, so if "has unique DNA" is a criteria for the value of human life then the sperm and egg are logically as valuable as the zygote.

I actually thought what happened was that some further pruning happened at fertilisation. So, say sperm has a gene and a egg has a gene at the exact same genome position, something happens and one become the dominant gene. The other the recessive.

So, that process of one becoming dominant the other recessive was the pruning I was referring to.

doctoremma wrote: »

And to bring this back to Jimi's last point, any one child could easily not have been born for reasons other than a procured abortion - conception a month earlier or later, the second-placed sperm making a final burst for glory. These factors would give you a child different to those you currently enjoy. And nobody cries for these lost children, these people that could have been.

These 'lost children' never existed. The second placed sperm didn't fertilise the egg, the conception didn't happen a month earlier, so NO CHILD WAS LOST. We can happily wonder, 'Just imagine if a different sperm fertilised the egg, or we conceived a month earlier, we would actually have a different child'. The fact of the matter is though, that this being that we invent NEVER ACTUALLY EXISTED. Its not a lost child, its a being that never existed in the first place. Thats why the whole, 'a sperm is a lost child' makes no sense.

We are only able to process the putative loss of what we have, not what we might have had. It's, of course, impossible to imagine life without your son or daughter as the person they are now, but the people they are now are nothing but quirks of biology (or fate, if one prefers). It's almost like a confirmation bias.

I agree to a point, but having my son and daughter allows me to look at them in utero as something more than clumps of cells etc. They were the same people they are now, just less developed. They started to exist at conception. If we had aborted them at 6 weeks, we would have been killing the two people who we now kiss goodnight, and no other children that we would subsequently create would be those two people that we killed previously.

Zombrex wrote: »

They did exist, it is just you don't think of them as a person. Which is fair enough, you don't have to. But then plenty of people don't think of the zygote as a child either.



If they "started" to exist at all they started to exist the moment you produced a sperm cell and your wife produced an egg cell. At that moment the DNA of your child was decided. All that happened at conception was the sperm and egg found each other, nothing new in terms of DNA was created.

But really from a biological point of view nothing started to exist. Your children are merely a biological extension of yourself and your wife. Life started once, 4.6 billion years ago, and it hasn't stopped since. All notions of individualism are human concepts that we try (often unsuccessfully) to apply to nature.



If you had used a condom when having sex the same thing would have happened.

I know you don't view it like that, but appealing to biology is really not supporting this argument. You think of your children as being created a conception. Fair enough. But that is simply how you view it, it has little if anything to do with what actually happens at conception. Some view their children being created at birth. That is as arbitrary as saying they were created at conception.

Sorry Zombrex, but I cannot agree with your assessment at all. A sperm is a sperm, and an egg is an egg. On their own, thats all they will ever be. When they meet, they become something different. A new human life. A sperm or an egg is destroyed, then thats exactly whats destroyed. Its at conception that the new unique human life is ACTUALLY created.

JimiTime wrote: »

I agree to a point, but having my son and daughter allows me to look at them in utero as something more than clumps of cells etc. They were the same people they are now, just less developed. They started to exist at conception. If we had aborted them at 6 weeks, we would have been killing the two people who we now kiss goodnight, and no other children that we would subsequently create would be those two people that we killed previously.

This is where my view will diverge fom yours, and I apologise in advance if mine sounds really insensitive, given your children are at the front of your mind here.

Had you aborted your child at six weeks, you would not have been killing the child that stands before you now. The child before you now is so much more than the six week embryo that begat them. And I think it impossible to work backwards on this point - emotions and (understandable) unwillingness to contemplate the non-existence of one's existent children provide a filter that obscures the point.

It's easier to work forward. Had you electively aborted a child (deliberately different language from 'your' child) at six weeks, it is very easy (I'd go so far to say naturally-arising) to categorise that child as never existing, to view it in the same way that you might view eggs and sperm, potential only. If you then go on to have children (as most women who have abortions do), the child before you would be a different child than that aborted. And I suspect you would find it equally impossible to imagine having had the aborted child.

Your children are who they are, and to imagine the living ones as not being here is horrible, yet to imagine the theoretical ones as living is abstract. That seems to be inconsistent. From my point of view, both situations are equally abstract.

I am sorry but not everyone understands the science. I'm pretty well read on science and there's a few things I wasn't sure about.

I am still trying to get into my head that that nothing happens at fertilization from a genetic point of view.

Tim Robbins wrote: »

That's what I meant by pruning. So if the sperm has a gene that become the recessive side when it meets the matching egg gene it has kinda of being pruned.

If it met another egg it may not have been pruned. Yeah?

Well, it's activity is "virtually pruned", if you like. In some cases, it's as if the sperm (paternal) version of the gene may as well not be there.

But with another egg, the paternal gene may be the dominant one, and then it would be the maternal gene was "virtually pruned".

So conceptually, you're nearly there. But it is important to remember that both the paternal and maternal versions of the genes remain physically intact in every cell. Their presence, donated by mother or father, was determined at the production of sperm or egg. And the "virtual pruning" we've arrived at is usually passive. There is (usually) no directed programme to switch off one version of the gene in favour of the other being swtiched on. Both genes are on and one characterstic out-competes the other.

And it's also worth remembering that the rules of genetics are never straightforward. Not all genes act at the same time and some have multiple functions. The sequence that renders the paternal version recessive in one context might be dominant in another.

Tim Robbins wrote: »

Do you mind not saying "you're nearly there" it's patronizing?

I was correct there is still some pruning at conception.

Really? I go to the effort to explain a concept to you, working with what you give me, and that's your reponsse? If I was patronising, it was unintentional. Apologies.

So, if you don't want to be "patronised", then sorry, but no, you're entirely incorrect. There is nothing that happens to a genome at conception that could remotely be construed as "pruning".

Tim Robbins wrote: »

Well pruning is not a scientific term in this context. But when you don't know what genes will be active from the sperm until fertilization happens.

There are processes where we know that sets of paternal or maternal genes will be switched off (see: imprinting). And we know that every female switches off an entire X chromosome in every cell (see: X inactivation). However, for a monogenic (single gene) characteristic, we would predict that both paternal and maternal genes are active. The dominant/recessive effects are downstream of gene expression.

I think you're suggesting that the effect of the information contained in the sperm (or the egg) is context-dependent (with the specifics of the complimentary gamete providing the context). That's reasonable. However, the information itself is determined during meiosis during gametogenesis and, short of unexpected mutation events, there's no physical change in this information from gametogenesis through conception.

Zombrex wrote: »

Only in so far as our ignorance in knowing this, not in so far as it is determined by the process of fertilization.

It is similar to saying I don't know what China is like until I go there. That is not saying that the process of going to China creates or determines China.

That argument can be applied to nearly anything we are claiming is non deterministic.

martinnew wrote: »

As the bible says.. In the womb I knew you. You existed from the moment of conception.

martinnew wrote: »

Yes I am

Jeremiah 1:5 says, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, And before you were born I consecrated you; I have appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

Not quite the same thing, is it? God is saying "I invented you and your whole personality and everything you're going to experience and then I created you" not "I dropped by to say hi when you were already on the way." Nor does it say anywhere, in any interpretation, "You existed from the moment of conception".




Anyway, we're taking God's example from the old testament about babies and newborns now, are we? Oh goodie! Ach, but you also mentioned "thou shalt not kill"... where to start?


The old testament god cared not one wit for newborns and pregnant women and was fond of a fair bit of genocide himself. Please explain to me why Christians pick and choose what applies and what doesnt. And why they never quote from Song Of Solomon.