First, sorry for the delayed response.

I would say that a human without any brain at all does not have the capacity to reason and will.

Let’s take a given entity (X), a given activity by said entity (A), and two points in time (P1 and P2). If X is the same entity at P2 as it was at P1, and it does A at P2, then it has the *capacity* to do A at P1. The only way to deny this is to deny that X existed per se at P1.

Applying this to our issue, the embryonic human being clearly does have this capacity, given that at a later stage in the same being’s development, s/he will do so. Does s/he have a brain at the embryonic stage? Obviously not, but that doesn’t change the nature of its latent capacities.

It raises the question for me what this world is for if most people never actually live in it.

But consider that until relatively recently in human history — and still today in parts of the world — there is a relatively high infant mortality rate. Again, that doesn’t mean that we deny the personhood of infants, just because many of them have died.

I would say that a human without any brain at all does not have the capacity to reason and will. There’s the potential that the capacity will be there at some point, but the actual capacity doesn’t exist during the early stages of pregnancy. It also wouldn’t exist in an ancephalic baby or the victim of a catastrophic head injury.

It seems to me that if you accept that a person exists from the moment of conception, and it is true that up to 80% of those persons don’t live past the first few days, it raises all kinds of questions about Christianity. Going back to my eariest lessons in grade school, “God made me to know, love, and serve him in this world, and to be happy with him forever in heaven.” It raises the question for me what this world is for if most people never actually live in it. Jesus said, “He who has ears, let him hear.” It always seemed to me that by that he meant virtually everyone. Now it seems (if life begins at conception) that possibly the majority of people never grow ears!

It used to be that people wondered about the fate of babies who died without baptism, but they were always the exceptions. It’s possible now that we are the exception, and the majority could never be baptized because they never grow to more than a speck.

It’s not as if it would contradict what we know (or think we know) if it were true that the majority of people never have physical lives that last more than a few days. But it does mean, to me in any case, that the explanation for why we are here, which we used to think covered almost everyone, actually applies to a fraction of humanity.

It was an anti-slavery northerner, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, who proposed the three-fifths compromise. The effect was to limit the South’s political representation and its ability to protect the institution of slavery. The great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass understood this. He called the three-fifths clause “a downright disability laid upon the slaveholding states” which deprived them of “two-fifths of their natural basis of representation.”

So a provision of the Constitution that was anti-slavery and pro-black in intent as well as in effect is today cited to prove that the American founders championed the cause of racist oppression. Isn’t it time to set the record straight and teach our children what really happened? As Jeane Kirkpatrick once put it, “We Americans must learn to face the truth about ourselves, no matter how pleasant it is.”

http://news.aol.com/newsbloggers/2007/07/03/the-myth-about-the-three-fifths-clause/

For me stumbling block is that I find it extremely difficult to know what it means to have a one-celled person, without a heart or a brain, that can’t think or feel.

This is certainly an understandable position in many ways, but I’d propose that a deeper exploration indicates its deficiency. The following might seem like foolish questions, but I’d ask you to bear with me…

Why, exactly, is a heart or a brain important to personhood? Why, exactly, is actually thinking & feeling important to personhood? I’d submit that personhood isn’t found in the number & nature of organs that an organism has, or its present state of thinking or feeling, but rather that it is found in the underlying *capacity* to reason & will. And it is because the conceptus has this capacity — even though it is latent — that it is recognized as a person.

Regarding the implications of embryos that do not survive to term, consider that our species as a whole has a 100% mortality rate… we *all* die some day. Yet this doesn’t mean that none of us are persons. The fact that a large number of human beings might die before they are born doesn’t mean that they aren’t persons, anymore than the fact that we *all* die means that none of us are persons.

I could probably find a way to agree that “life begins at conception,” but I find it very difficult to accept that a person comes into existence the moment a sperm fertilizes a human egg.

For me stumbling block is that I find it extremely difficult to know what it means to have a one-celled person, without a heart or a brain, that can’t think or feel.

Another stumbling block is the enormous number of conceptions that take place that either do not result in either pregnancies (because they fail to implant) or live births (because the miscarriage rate in very early pregnancy is relatively high). If these are actually people, what is their fate? They may very well constitute the majority of humanity. It seems a more staggering thought than that the earth is not the center of the universe.

Also, in cases where the life of the mother is at risk (and I know they are rare), even if I were to conclude that the unborn child is a human being and a person in some sense, I still would tend to believe that the life of the mother is more important than the life of the unborn child (the Jewish view, as I understand it) and that an abortion would be permissible to save the mother’s life. In the case of ectopic pregnancy, it is permitted to surgically remove the part of the mother’s fallopian tube in which the embryo has attached, thereby causing certain death to the embryo. However, Catholic thought forbids giving the mother a drug which will kill the embryo and save the mother. I know the reasoning that deems one permissible and the other not, but I find it very difficult to see any significant moral difference between the two methods of treatment (except that the illicit method spares the threatened mother surgery).

He’s probably open to choosing a “pro-infanticide” running mate as well, eh?

Let me ask you in turn: what do you mean by the word “liberal” and how does your usage relate to Americanist dualism?

Both.

Life begins at conception. Do you agree or disagree?

LCB,

Are you calling abortion infanticide? Or are you saying Obama is pro-infanticide because he blocked the born-alive protection bill?

The mental and logical gymnastics being undertaken by liberal posters here to keep justifying their support for a pro-infanticide candidate is mind numbing.

How can one reason with individuals who are themselves being unreasonable?

But when the Democrats endorse Roe vs. Wade yet again, the headline informs us how their platform “Disappoints”.

Interesting choice of where to focus one’s outrage there, MM. Good to know what really gets your blood boiling.