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Paralyzed Woman Walks Again
mgv writes "It's been promised for years, but it's just become a reality. Stem cells taken from cord blood have enabled a paralysed woman in South Korea to walk again for the first time in 20 years. The details are on the Sydney Morning Herald Site which requires registration, but can also be seen on the World Peace Herald. Too late for Christopher Reeve, but not for the thousands of new injuries worldwide each year or the millions of paralysed people from other diseases in the world."
A fetus doesn't even have synaptic connections until the third trimester, and thus is unlikely even to feel pain. Because it can someday be a human doesn't mean it neccesarily is one, there's still good reasoning to consider it no different than a corpse. It's a lot like a brain dead organ donor.
On the whole life or death thing, how do these embryos compare to the average things that most people eat? It's a view that these things are fundamentally different because they might someday be a human that makes people quiver.
I think abortions should be legal until the child has the intelligence of the smartest thing I eat. From what I understand this would be about two years after birth.
The best posts are both flamebait and informative.
For now, the unborn is the only class of human beings enough people aren't repulsed by. The Nazis would have accellerated medical research if they weren't in such a hurry to exterminate the Jews and others, but they were doing eugenics and wanted to breed the aryan superman, not bioengineer him.
Calling something a "religious belief" does not make its truth or falsity change. Thou Shall Not Kill is either a universal and transcendent principle ("sacred" would be the term all but theophobes would recognize), or it is only something for the elite and not the disenfranchised. Nazis and Arians in 1940 Germany. The Commisars in the Communist countries (who were atheists that slaughtered millions of the "inconvienient"). In the modern west, those who haven't been aborted.
You can try to follow a logical trail to prevent your own killing/murder, but it will eventually lead to what is a religious belief which you cannot prove in the mathematical sense, so must impose some idea of human dignity. But then the exercise is to try to create a definition that allows the murder of those whom you want to murder, but doesn't happen to include you. But then it is all subjective.
If human dignity is objective, it belongs to all human beings - and the embryo as well as the zygote, fetus, baby, toddler, adolescent, adult, and elderly are all human. They are not fish, tomatoes, or rocks.
Someone was made able to walk without murdering innocent human beings. Yet it seems that there is a dark side to this world - and I would say demonic - something else that is rarely believed in - that seems to think only Molech can do miracles, and he requires the sacrifice of innocent children before he will do his magic. We now call the priests of Molech "researchers", but they would rather murder a human person (and patent the stem cell line? Where are all the IP libertarians now?) even if the research is less productive.
That is an evil attitude.
Once conception has taken place, it is inevitable that birth will take place.
Humans are by definition rational animals. Brainless cell clumps don't qualify.
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So, why are you so sure that humans have any intrinsic dignity? Why aren't we just bags of meat with greater self-awareness.
Now here's the real question. If intentionally creating embryos then killing them is murder, then why aren't you crusading to have fertility clinics shut down? Don't try to back track, you said it now stick by it. The doctors who work at these clinics KNOW that some of the embryos will be destroyed. Why aren't they murderers?
The truth about this stupid argument is that the only way pro-lifers can make a logical argument against abortion is to claim that life begins at conception. Otherwise, they'll have to draw a line somewhere during the pregnancy for "life" to begin. While there may be the possibility of life to come from a fertilized embryo, the chances are MUCH greater that nothing will come from it. More importanty, an embryo doesn't really exist until about 2 weeks in, at which time the organization of the cells can really be observed.
As sad as this is for you, human life is not unique. Only the pathetic belief in "god" that so many disgusting weak minded fools use as a crutch has kept this stupid debate going.