Your approach does not seem to depend on a hypothetical distinction between two microscopic pieces of tissue and one such piece of tissue; and isn't being used as a purely rhetorical technique. Act on your emotions, sure; but if you try to justify actions that affect others (such as compelling women to continue with unwanted - even involuntary - pregnancies) purely on the basis of an appeal to the audience's emotions, you can't expect that to work.
The alternative, I think, is to recognise that there is a continuum; a just-fertilised egg is not a human life any more than a sperm and an unfertilised egg in close proximity are; a baby on the point of being born is a human life; the states in between should be assessed as to their degree of sentience. The law has to draw a line, but that line will of necessity be drawn on a shade of grey; there's no one point at which we can say "up to this point this is not a human, but after this point it is".
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Date: 2004-01-14 06:08 am (UTC)The alternative, I think, is to recognise that there is a continuum; a just-fertilised egg is not a human life any more than a sperm and an unfertilised egg in close proximity are; a baby on the point of being born is a human life; the states in between should be assessed as to their degree of sentience. The law has to draw a line, but that line will of necessity be drawn on a shade of grey; there's no one point at which we can say "up to this point this is not a human, but after this point it is".