Roberdorus said:
OKGrannie is the one who said that a fetus isn't a person in the first place. The burden of proof is on her.
FALSE.
OKgrannie said:
The burden of proof is always on the person who asserts something IS. It would be possible to prove that person wrong, whereas it is impossible to prove something ISN'T, or in other words to prove a negative.
Actually, that's not entirely true, either. It is not always impossible to prove a negative;
Fermat's Last Theorem was a negative statement that has been proved. But it took centuries to develop that proof, and that is the real point. If a Debate is to be resolved in a reasonable amount of time, then statements that cannot be proved, or take too long to be proved, have to be presented in some alternate form which can be proved, or else they have to be excluded from the debate. Well, the evidence is, positive statements are always more provable than negative statements, and so in a Debate it is the positive statement which can always be required to be proved.
And so the pro-choicer can claim, "An unborn human is an animal-class organism." --and this is provably true. But if the pro-lifer claims "An unborn human is more than merely animal-class; it is a person-class organism." --then that is what the pro-lifer must prove. Have fun!
Roberdorus said:
I think the words "individual", "person", and "human" are in conformity with one another and the dictionary seems to agree with me:
Too bad you didn't specify which dictionary. Try this one:
Definition of individual - Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
I don't see the word "human" in there anywhere. And definition #3 is the one that I most often use; it is essentially a synonym for one of the meanings of "single". That is, "an individual snail" is synonymous with "a single snail".
Of course, there are plenty other synonyms for the word:
individual - Synonyms from Thesaurus.com
and I do recognize that "person" is one of them. But it is a silly mistake to think that that one is the only one that matters.
FutureIncoming said:
{{"person" equals "human'}} implies that only humans can be persons, which is a ludicrously prejudiced notion, given what we know about the vast vast Universe.
Roberdorus said:
I'll tell you what-- if we ever happen to find intelligent extraterrestrials, I'll be happy to broaden my definition of personhood to include them, their children, and their unborn children. I should add that I'm much more comfortable with broadening my definition of personhood than I am with narrowing it.
Yet you are still avoiding the
generic notion of "person". What is it that distinguishes a person from an animal? You
would be broadening your definition, when you shift it from a particular example (or examples) to a general rule. And just because you might not like the result, that unborn humans fail to qualify as more than animals,
that does not make the result untrue. You still need to prove the positive statement that an unborn human is more than just an animal, after all.
Roberdorus said:
{{If}} a human doesn't achieve person status "until measurably after birth", would you be for a mother's right to kill her newborn, infant, or even toddler? OR (and this would be rather helpful) could you designate a more exact point at which a human achieves person status than "measurably after birth"? Thanks.
I would support, but not denounce the unavailability of, infanticide for a limited time after birth (perhaps equivalent to ten or eleven months after conception), mostly as an extension of already existing (and has-in-the-past existed) killings of defective human bodies. Do remember that if just-after-birth a human is still merely an animal, then we can in theory clinically examine this new human animal body for serious defects that (1) no person deserves to be saddled with, and (2) the gene pool doesn't need those defects, either. Obviously killing this body,
before it grows enough brainpower to qualify for person status, is superior to killing it after it grows into person status. All the denouncements by pro-lifers of Historic mistreatments of humans have consistently failed to take into account the fact that almost all those Historic mistreatments involved human
persons on the receiving end, and not in-measurable-fact pure-animal-class humans.
As for a clear dividing line between person an animal, there is in truth no such easily definable thing. This is a case where Science cannot help Law very much, and so existing Law, which currently declares any born human to be a person, has no great rationale to be changed. And, with improved amniocentesis tests and sonograms and optical fiber probes, we can identify most defectives before birth, anyway, and abort them before the Law can do its quite-arbitrary personhood-granting thing. It is a generally workable compromise.
Next, remember the "wanted" thing. The average woman who goes through childbirth, when abortion is legal, can be presumed to have wanted a child. Why would she then kill it? And what of putting it up for adoption instead of killing it? Meanwhile, abortions are almost always done because of
unwanted pregnancies. Statistically, therefore, the more that abortion is allowed, the less infanticide there will be, which just about makes your question moot. Or at least it will be about a relatively ignorable quantity of infanticides. Finally, remember that genetics plays an "influencing" role in human behavior. It doesn't control humans like puppets on strings (as it
does do for insects), but it does affect the probabilites that various human behaviors will occur. Infanticide would qualify as a "behavior". The result is that parents who kill their offspring are weeding out from the gene pool, whatever genes have influenced them to kill their offspring. Infanticides are already relatively rare, because of that one simple fact -- and in the Long Run, infanticides can only become rarer (on a per-capita basis). No need to get all huffy about
parental infanticide of a mere human animal, therefore! Genetically speaking, it's a self-correcting thing. In the long run. Meanwhile, abortions might be expected to lead to something of the same, over the long run, except that abortions are often followed (or preceded) by actual births of infants that are not killed. Those genes, influencing the probability of an abortion, usually get passed on in the gene pool, therefore.
Should I agree to stick to the medical in this case, can that be accompanied by an agreement by others to stick to the medical, and to exclude the legal? Heh, heh, heh....you pro-lifers will 
