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In reply to the discussion: I hate hate hate so-called pro-lifers. I hate hate hate anti-choicers. [View all]NullTuples
(6,017 posts)By shifting verbal shorthand they've set it up so they can "prove" life begins at conception. They've been playing 3-card Monty with their rhetoric.
The problem for them has always been that until quite near birth, there is nobody home inside the human brain. We now know that's because until that stage of fetal brain development, there simply is not the capacity for organized signals. It's more like a room full of spools of cable rather than a computer network. And in humans and other animals with complex brains, the individual exists in the brain. Our consciousness exists in the brain. But not until it has made a sufficient number of connections between neurons - and this is key - and then pruned them so that organized signaling is possible.
Christian extremists used to depend on their belief in a "soul" to determine when a fetus became a person. Problem is, that's a matter of personal opinion, not fact. It was a weak arguing point outside of their subculture. Now though, they've shifted the language so that people talk about when "life" begins. A single cell bacteria is life. A mushroom is life. As is a human fetus. None of them are a person though.