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Originally Posted by Matthew Shea  Regarding the embryo, how do you know it isn't conscious? |
It has no nerves and no sense organs.
If a human embryo is conscious, then why not mosquitoes? Yeast?
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Have you ever watched video of very young fetuses in the womb? When you see how babies react to their environment only a few months into the pregnancy, it's hard to argue there isn't consciousness yet. Even putting that aside, given time, it will develop into a human. As far as I'm concerned, that makes it human and gives it equal rights to an adult.
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Why does being a *potential* human give it *actual* rights?
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Regarding the cow, we're talking about human life here, specifically one's control over their own life or a life growing inside them. The meat eating debate has been hashed out a million times here already.
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My point was that it shouldn't necessarily be given life merely because it is human. For me, consciousness and the capacity for suffering are far more important. A human embryo has neither, whereas an adult cow has both. Yet many people on the pro-life side choose to eat meat. I'm not arguing for vegetarianism (you're right, that's been hashed out too many times) but just trying to show that everyone is so taken up with the fact that this organism is
human, which in the earliest stages of life doesn't mean much. A banana is 50% genetically identical to us--does that make it murder to eat one?