Abortion.

[Lief Erikson]

Insidious, regarding your comments about the brain structure, spinal cord and all that. My point earlier on in bringing up the "would you kill me?" scenario was that we cannot really draw the line between when someone is a human being and when they aren't. The scientific community can't do that either. You responded that I was already born. However, it is clear that in the months immediately before birth, the child is completely human-like. You yourself have said that even in the fetus stage, it is a human fetus we're talking about.

We don't judge people, give them rights or take them, based upon their intelligence level in this country. Mentally retarded people have just as many rights as others. If we make a judgment that the human fetus isn't developed enough to count as a human (a judgment that science cannot make for us), then we're saying that a certain IQ level indicates humanity. There's no way we can draw this line. There's no way we can be sure the line won't be bumped up or down, if we do decide we have the right to draw it. We might start killing the mentally retarded in the future, because they aren't human. Slaves in the past were oppressed because they weren't viewed as human, even though there was no real way of knowing whether they were or not. When is the human fetus no longer a collection of cells but a real person? If we judge it based on intelligence, then a German Shepherd dog should be considered more worth keeping alive then a two year old human. The dog knows more. It is more intelligent. It has a less great capacity to learn, but its knowledge is greater. So judging based upon intelligence doesn't work. If we judge based upon capacity to learn, that also doesn't work, for human embryos are enormously capable of learning. Making the decision is setting ourselves up as God, saying when a person is a person and when he or she isn't. Science cannot make the decision for us. If we decide we have the right to say that the fetus isn't a person yet, it is simply a judgment based upon our own feelings. People are constantly maturing throughout life. A 1 year old is less intelligent then a 30 year old. A -7 months year old is less intelligent then a 1 year old. The problem is that we cannot learn from science whether we're destroying a person at that stage or not, and we also make a judgment that we have the right to judge when someone is a person or not. That could lead to mentally impaired people not standing up to whatever arbitrary IQ test is set up. The IQ test might change also, after a while, when society wants to be able to kill people at more developed ages. It's a sick discussion, but one that's naturally derived from the stance that we have the right to judge on this.