You guys might as well be discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a needle.

For Ed's sake, a fertilized egg doesn't reach the uturus until at least 5 days after it has been fertilized! At this point it attaches itself to nthe uterean wall and starts cell division.

What was the magic human soul doing for those 5 days? What was it doing before? What was it doing 100,000 years ago?

Are cancer cells also precious life which must be preserved? Why not? If anything they have more life and willingness to grow than any other type of cell. In fact they grow uncontrallably!

How difficult can it be to understand that the question of abortion, is not a question of when life begins, but a difficult question of morals and ethics?

That's more or less my point, I'm just using a very roundabout way of making it. I'm saying that there is no point where it would make sense to say life begins at, so the arguement "it's a human after conception" is shakey.

Women don't have abortions in five days. Don't be an idiot.

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Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands? ~ Ernest Gaines

Does it kill an embreyo?

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Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands? ~ Ernest Gaines

To condemn murder but have no problem with murdering those who commit murder is not in of itself hypocritical. Change the type of murder to one not in debate: instead of "abortion", pick "shooting". "Shooting random people is bad. Shooting people who are in the act of shooting random people in order to stop them is good. Shooting them after the fact in order to prevent future occurrences is acceptable." That would represent a consistent set of views and, if shooting is changed to generic murder and abortion considered a murder, conclude that murdering those who abort to be acceptable. No hypocrisy is necessary.

As an aside, my line is the appearance of brain activity – frontal lobe to be accurate but activity anywhere to err on the side of caution. Any abortion prior to that I consider to have the same morality as a contraceptive, any after to have the same morality as killing a child a minute after birth. Brain stem formation is about the 7th week (http://brainmind.com/FetalBrainDevelopment.html). That gives a window of 3 weeks to notice a missing period, get tested for pregnancy, make a decision to abort, and leave a safety window; inconvenient but not impossible.

I base this off counting the number of people in Siamese twins, off my own conditions for pulling the plug in the event that I fall into a coma, off the part I would recognize as human if a person were broken into parts and each part placed into a new body with the other parts being artificial (a macabre thought experiment, to be sure, but an enlightening one), that I consider a person completely on life support to still be a person and that is it not okay for the owner of the machine to kill them (rejects the argument that a fetus being dependent makes it okay for a mother to abort), and how I would consider an amputated limb if medical technology existed to grow the rest of the body back around it.

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Because claiming to be justice is a long-standing and well observed tradition.

Actually, implantation doesn't take place until the fourth week of pregnancy - around two weeks after conception.

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We've got rules and maps and guns in our backs, but we still can't just behave ourselves. Even if to save our own lives, we are a brutal kind. The Shins

what is the morning after pill for it alters the lining of the womb so the fertilised egg cannot attach, dont be a tit

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Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands? ~ Ernest Gaines