[Deckard]

Originally Posted by bryantm3

the issue is "do you value a human life?" to me, once a child is concieved, it is a person. before that, it's up to the individual because it's their sperm and eggs.

Person is just an emotive label that indicates you think these cells should be sacred - what we're actually talking about is the potential of a person in the sense that we normally envisage a person - or if you really want to broaden your definition of the word person in that way, then let's at least acknowledge how these various stages of 'person'hood differ instead of trying to gloss over them - in other words, what it means for a 'person' at these different stages of development to suffer, what it means for this 'person' to otherwise have a sense of 'themselves' continuing into the future, etc. Because anyone can band around emotive words like baby and kill and gain the emotional upperhand. Anyone can refer to children and people, and appear to have an irrefutable argument. Actually, all you're doing is equating the conceived eggs with what they have the potential to become, and asserting that they should be treated the same without providing a convincing reason why that should be the case.

Calling any post-conception eggs a person actually means nothing other than awarding it some sort of sanctity based on what it has the potential to become, or based on how marvellous the process of creation is and it feels wrong to interfere with it, or on what I detailed in my previous post regarding the potential person argument. That's not to deny that we don't marvel at the prospect of a fertilized egg in a way that most of us don't about "our jizz". That's fine. But that's not sufficient reason in my eyes to award a fertilized egg that special sanctity over an unfertilized one.

Originally Posted by bryantm3

if you leave your jizz on the bathroom floor it doesn't turn into a baby.

Then you're being distance-ist or discriminating on geography, temperature, etc - factors beyond its control, because it still has the potential to be a human life before you do what you do for it to end up there. That there are two elements (sperm and unfertilized egg) rather than one doesn't show that this twosome is not also a potential person, it just shows that you've managed to carelessly eject some of it onto the bathroom floor! I would suggest if you were being truly consistent, you would see and treat all 'life' as equally sacred, not just a certain stage of development. Of course that position leads to an absurdity, which is why I don't see how there's any sense in subscribing to it.

fertilized eggs develop on their own.

Not if you take them out and chuck 'em on the bathroom floor. You see my point? Unfertilized eggs are still very much part of an ongoing process called life - and while in the body, have that potential of ultimately leading to a unique human life.