Last post on the thread --- Bodhi, minnie and D all said a fetus is a human. If you link back to their response, you clicked "like" on all of them. Now you're saying a fetus ISN'T a human. Which is it?
Perhaps I can explain. The phrase "a human" refers to a biological entity. An individual of this type of entity originates with an egg-fertilization/conception event, yielding a living cell, the zygote. The zygote contains DNA code telling it what to do next. If that code is not defective, the zygote will start dividing (becoming a morula). Later, the morula will become a blastocyst which in turn will become an embryo which in turn will become a fetus.
If the DNA code is defective in a particular way, the blastocyst might become a hydatidiform mole, instead of an embryo. In every case, including the "mole" case, we are talking about "a human". All of their DNA is 100% human in its origin, so what else could they be?
Meanwhile "a human being" is a person. Scientists are quite certain that persons can exist that are not human --
dolphins are major contenders for the first-identified entities in that category. Considering that science-fiction authors have been for decades using phrases like "intelligent being", "alien being", and "extraterrestrial being" to reference a variety of different (fictional) types of non-human persons, we should seriously consider the possibility that if dolphins are Formally Acknowledged as having person status, then dolphins likely should be called "dolphin beings". The word "being", see, is simply a way of recognizing person-status --and therefore the phrase "a human being" simply is describing "a human"
that also happens to be a person.
Socially, there is widespread consistency here --nobody ever talks about "centipede beings" because no centipede qualifies as a person. In the movie "
Alien" a non-human entity is a major character, but it only acts like an animal-class entity, not a person-class entity, and so it is never called "an alien being". Other movies in the "franchise", such as "
Alien vs Predator", make it quite clear that that type of (fictional) alien entity is indeed only a mere-animal entity (but clever, like a chimpanzee is clever).
Now it is a fact that not even abortion opponents will claim that a hydatidiform mole is a person, "a human being", even though that entity is most certainly "a human" --its DNA is 100% human in origin, so what else could it be? Thus we have
Objectively Verifiable Proof that just because something might be "a human", that does not automatically mean it is also "a human being", a person. As additional data supporting that Proof, there are brain-dead human adults on life-support --the doctors and the scientists and the lawyers ALL agree that
the person is dead, even though the human body is still very much alive (except for the brain). Therefore that is another example of "a human" that is not "a human being", a person.
Pro-choicers merely note that since legal personhood begins at birth, the status of any unborn human is never more than "a human", and only after birth does it become "a human being" --because the Law says so! (The scientific data relevant to personhood indicates that it takes more than a year after birth for an average human to start exhibiting any characteristics normally associated with persons --the characteristics allow persons to declare themselves to be superior to mere-animal entities-- but that data is
currently irrelevant to the Law, since the Law existed long before the data was discovered.)
OK?