Our rights do not originate with government, but they are to be "secured" by government.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

By Tom Rhodes, 7/23/2014

Not much of a headline, but the protection of Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness is the why and purpose of establishing this great nation. Every group be it a country, a company, a club, a committee, a team, a church, have a purpose. If they didn’t then the group wouldn’t exist. That purpose may be as noble as the purpose the US exists, which is to protect the Live, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness, of all individuals equally. Or the purpose may be as ignoble as selling drugs and killing rival gangs. Or as simple as having a good time sharing a common interest like quilting club, or book club, or beer club.

The USA is unique in it was instituted not to control and rule over the people, but specifically to protect the people’s unalienable natural rights. First of these is the right to life. Don’t protect that right and the rest is inconsequential. Many in the LP have abandoned the idea that everybody’s life deserves protection. They have adopted the idea that some people’s lives are of such little value that they may be killed without reason and such murder should go unpunished.

Abortion is the immoral killing of an innocent human who doesn’t have the ability to protect themselves. Lie to yourself all you want but you cannot scientifically say that a fetus is not a unique human being. The clearly established scientific fact is that from the earliest stages of development, each of us is a distinct, living, and whole human being. Every embryology textbook out there says that each of us began as a single-celled zygote (see references below for some examples) find me an embryology text that doesn’t establish new life of mammals begins at conception. It is true that a new life at the point of conception has yet to mature, but the kind of thing that new life is, is clear. This is settled science.



All that remains isn’t a question of if an embryo or fetus is a live human being, but the philosophical debate on how humans in their earliest stages of development should be valued. Don’t confuse the question of a person’s value with empirical fact they exist.

Most pro-abortion people be they liberal, libertarian, conservative, or authoritarian are militant about their views. They fight to have opposing views silenced. The issue is not the value they place on the views of dissenters, nor the view pro-life people have on the views of the pro-abortion crowd. The issue is and has been and is the elephant in the room, the value we place on life itself.

The pro-abortion crowd argues that that each and every human being does not have an equal right to life. The objective truth is abortion is the termination of a human life. No matter how they try to change abortion to being a choice or personal preference, abortion is a value decision that says the terminated human life has no value. Abortion cannot be a personal preference. Choosing chocolate or vanilla is a preference, choosing to terminate what is scientifically a distinct human being is not.

Arguing that abortion is justified because a woman has a right to control her own body, is a classic logical fallacy. That position assumes there is only one body involved, that of the woman. Arguing that nobody knows when life begins is the same type of logical fallacy: it assumes contrary to what every embryology text says, that life begins at birth. That women will get illegal unsafe abortions if they weren’t legal, is called "arguing the consequence." Using that logic we should make resisting rape illegal to make it safer for rapists. The issue isn’t safety, it’s the status and value of the human being who is terminated. If the argument for abortion doesn’t apply to toddlers or the old and infirm, then it’s a bad argument. These arguments are based on irrationally assuming the falsehod that the unborn aren’t humans. The objective truth is they simply point out that some people have value and others don't. Those that don't have value don’t have rights based on some arbitrary standard, in this case age, but it could just as easily be race or sex.

From conception, even as a single cell, the new human life begins at conception the new persons first specific behavior of self defense. The scientific basis for distinguishing one cell type from another rests on two criteria: differences in what something is made of (its molecular composition) and differences in how the cell behaves. These two criteria are universally agreed upon and employed throughout the scientific enterprise. They are not “religious” beliefs or matters of personal opinion. They are objective, verifiable scientific criteria that determine precisely when a new cell type is formed. Based on these criteria, the joining (or fusion) of sperm and egg clearly produces a new cell type, the zygote or one-cell embryo. Cell fusion is a well studied and very rapid event, occurring in less than a second. Because the zygote arises from the fusion of two different cells, it contains all the components of both sperm and egg, and therefore this new cell has a unique molecular composition that is distinct from either gamete. Thus the zygote that comes into existence at the moment of sperm-egg fusion meets the first scientific criterion for being a new cell type: its molecular make-up is clearly different from that of the cells that gave rise to it.

Subsequent to sperm-egg fusion, events rapidly occur in the zygote that do not normally occur in either sperm or egg. Within minutes, the zygote initiates a change in its internal state that will, over the next 30 minutes, block additional sperm from binding to the cell surface. Thus, the zygote acts immediately to oppose the function of the gametes from which it is derived; while the “goal” of both sperm and egg is to find each other and to fuse, the first act of the zygote is to prevent any further binding of sperm to the cell surface. Clearly, the zygote has entered into a new pattern of behavior, and therefore meets the second scientific criterion for being a new cell type.
LINK

To be pro-abortion you must abandon the philosophy that all people have the same natural rights. To be pro-abortion you must take the position that only those people of some arbitrary stage of development, or have some arbitrary ability, are of value, and those who don’t meet that arbitrary standard don’t have rights. You must abandon the idea that “All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Humans differ immeasurably with respect to and degrees of development, capacities, accomplishments, and desires, they are nevertheless equal because they share a common human nature. How can there be any objective human rights that apply to anyone, if we deny that?

The USA is unique, it was established to protect the rights of the people, specifically the right to life. You cannot be a rational libertarian and support abortion. You cannot rationally believe that there are unalienable rights and support abortion. If you support legalized abortion, you have made a value judgment on people, you are clearly saying that some people are of value and deserve to have their life protected and others are not. If you support abortion as a right, you simply say that a mature woman’s life is of more value than a less developed person’s life, and by virtue of her life having superior value, she can choose to terminate the life another person of less value without penalty.

If you’re pro-abortion, the chances you’re an elitist who places the value of some people over others; to the point that some people’s lives have more value than others. The numbers don’t lie, look at who gets aborted, blacks, poor, minorities, are terminated in vastly disproportionate numbers. Rationally you would have to conclude that abortion has been an effective tool of elitists to decrease the population of “undesirables.”

Rhetoric to confuse the question of a person’s value with the empirical fact they exist, doesn’t change the fact. Scientifically there is no argument, conception is the point at which a new unique human life is created. Rationalize and equivocate all you want, being pro-abortion is a value judgment. If you are pro-abortion you simply believe humans who don’t meet some arbitrary standard don’t have the right to life, much less the right to vote, speech, religion, liberty, property, or even to pursue happiness. If you’re a pro-abortion libertarian, you should be ashamed.



References:

"Human development begins after the union of male and female gametes or germ cells during a process known as fertilization (conception).
"Fertilization is a sequence of events that begins with the contact of a sperm (spermatozoon) with a secondary oocyte (ovum) and ends with the fusion of their pronuclei (the haploid nuclei of the sperm and ovum) and the mingling of their chromosomes to form a new cell. This fertilized ovum, known as a zygote, is a large diploid cell that is the beginning, or primordium, of a human being."
[Moore, Keith L. Essentials of Human Embryology. Toronto: B.C. Decker Inc, 1988, p.2]


"Embryo: the developing organism from the time of fertilization until significant differentiation has occurred, when the organism becomes known as a fetus."
[Cloning Human Beings. Report and Recommendations of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission. Rockville, MD: GPO, 1997, Appendix-2.]


"Embryo: An organism in the earliest stage of development; in a man, from the time of conception to the end of the second month in the uterus."
[Dox, Ida G. et al. The Harper Collins Illustrated Medical Dictionary. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993, p. 146]


"Embryo: The early developing fertilized egg that is growing into another individual of the species. In man the term 'embryo' is usually restricted to the period of development from fertilization until the end of the eighth week of pregnancy."
[Walters, William and Singer, Peter (eds.). Test-Tube Babies. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 160]


"The development of a human being begins with fertilization, a process by which two highly specialized cells, the spermatozoon from the male and the oocyte from the female, unite to give rise to a new organism, the zygote."
[Langman, Jan. Medical Embryology. 3rd edition. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1975, p. 3]


"Embryo: The developing individual between the union of the germ cells and the completion of the organs which characterize its body when it becomes a separate organism.... At the moment the sperm cell of the human male meets the ovum of the female and the union results in a fertilized ovum (zygote), a new life has begun.... The term embryo covers the several stages of early development from conception to the ninth or tenth week of life."
[Considine, Douglas (ed.). Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia. 5th edition. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1976, p. 943]


"I would say that among most scientists, the word 'embryo' includes the time from after fertilization..."
[Dr. John Eppig, Senior Staff Scientist, Jackson Laboratory (Bar Harbor, Maine) and Member of the NIH Human Embryo Research Panel -- Panel Transcript, February 2, 1994, p. 31]


"The development of a human begins with fertilization, a process by which the spermatozoon from the male and the oocyte from the female unite to give rise to a new organism, the zygote."
[Sadler, T.W. Langman's Medical Embryology. 7th edition. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins 1995, p. 3]


"The question came up of what is an embryo, when does an embryo exist, when does it occur. I think, as you know, that in development, life is a continuum.... But I think one of the useful definitions that has come out, especially from Germany, has been the stage at which these two nuclei [from sperm and egg] come together and the membranes between the two break down."
[Jonathan Van Blerkom of University of Colorado, expert witness on human embryology before the NIH Human Embryo Research Panel -- Panel Transcript, February 2, 1994, p. 63]


"Zygote. This cell, formed by the union of an ovum and a sperm (Gr. zyg tos, yoked together), represents the beginning of a human being. The common expression 'fertilized ovum' refers to the zygote."
[Moore, Keith L. and Persaud, T.V.N. Before We Are Born: Essentials of Embryology and Birth Defects. 4th edition. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, 1993, p. 1]


"The chromosomes of the oocyte and sperm are...respectively enclosed within female and male pronuclei. These pronuclei fuse with each other to produce the single, diploid, 2N nucleus of the fertilized zygote. This moment of zygote formation may be taken as the beginning or zero time point of embryonic development."
[Larsen, William J. Human Embryology. 2nd edition. New York: Churchill Livingstone, 1997, p. 17]


"Although life is a continuous process, fertilization is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed.... The combination of 23 chromosomes present in each pronucleus results in 46 chromosomes in the zygote. Thus the diploid number is restored and the embryonic genome is formed. The embryo now exists as a genetic unity."
[O'Rahilly, Ronan and M?ller, Fabiola. Human Embryology & Teratology. 2nd edition. New York: Wiley-Liss, 1996, pp. 8, 29. This textbook lists "pre-embryo" among "discarded and replaced terms" in modern embryology, describing it as "ill-defined and inaccurate" (p. 12}]


"Almost all higher animals start their lives from a single cell, the fertilized ovum (zygote)... The time of fertilization represents the starting point in the life history, or ontogeny, of the individual."
[Carlson, Bruce M. Patten's Foundations of Embryology. 6th edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996, p. 3]


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