@Smokin Joe
You know damn well it isn't a human being until it is born,but your religious bias will never allow you to even admit it to yourself,so I am done wasting my time trying to discuss it with you.
You assert religious bias, but I am talking about simple genetics. Hardly a religious bias.
Pete, the only religious bias here is your ANTI-religious bias. I get that, you have run into some hypocrites who have not only not lived up to their pious claims, but maybe used that position to injure people, perhaps getting very personal, and you hate them and the God they claimed to represent over it. That makes as much sense as hating Ford or Chevy or Dodge because you ran into some dealers who were crooks and jerks, but it's your Right to believe what you believe, for whatever reason you believe it.
But, since I am a scientist, let's get something straight.
Regardless of what I may believe about how everything came into being, it doesn't change the fact that a human sperm and a human egg combined produce a human being and
nothing else.
It works the same way for any species which engages in sexual reproduction.
In fact, it is so specific, that for most species, you can't combine two different species and get a critter at all, and with critters with similar DNA, if you do, it is a hybrid that can't reproduce. (Ligers, Hinnies, Zorses, mules, beefalos), but get dissimilar enough, and you won't get anything at all.
In nature, it takes a genetic contribution from one of each sex, and when those are combined, you get another member of that species. Whatever embryo that results is known by its species, It might be a chicken embryo, a dog embryo, but it is still a chicken or a dog. Nothing else will result, unless you kill it. The fetal pigs dissected in comparative anatomy classes in pre-med are still pigs.
That isn't religion, it isn't a religious bias, it's Biology.
The genetics determine the nature of the offspring.
Incidentally, those same genetics determine whether a child is male of female, and no amount of addadictomie/lopitoff surgery, hormone manipulation, mental illness, and social cruelty will make it anything else. The process isn't completely perfect, there are mutations, genetic damage, even bad genes contributed by one parent or the other which can lead to variations in human form, but the whole genetic thing has been pretty well mapped out, at least at the basic level.
You can play games with
when you call the result of two humans mating a human being, but either that ovum and sperm combine or they don't. If they don't--nothing happens. If they do, a human being results whether you decide to play definition games and not consider them "human" when they are conceived, until they are born, until they wear long pants, until they can vote, until their IQ reaches a certain level, whatever games you want to play with deciding to call the result "human" the result is the same: a human.
The deception of calling the result less than human just makes it more palatable to the average person who doesn't want the actual blood on their hands to farm out a license to kill, whether the 'subhumans' be the unborn, people from another tribe of humans, or another race, that gimmick has been used to justify subjugation, robbery, enslavement, and slaughter since people started killing people.
Now, though, it is being used to kill three times as many Americans as were killed in the industrially efficient genocide mills of the 1940s, which incidentally, used the same logic to justify their actions--that the victims were less than human.
Once you let that argument stand, all you have to do to justify killing anyone is move the goalposts and change the definition of who is or isn't "human". It is almost always someone the people writing the definition want to rip off, whether that be for their land, their gold, their art, or their very lives.
Aside from that biological argument, though, there is the fact that legally, (as I mentioned), if someone kills a pregnant woman, they can be charged with two murders--one for the mom, and one for the infant.
Legally, that victim of murder is considered human; another human life has been taken.
Otherwise, it'd be like shooting a tumor, a "mass of tissue", and from warts to cancer, we kill tumors--"masses of tissue"-- every day.
How, in the one case, can killing the little human inside be deemed cause for a murder charge, and in another case, be just shredded "tissue" in the waste bin--even if you can count the fingers and toes? That's legally inconsistent.
So, from implanted zygote to embryo to fetus to newborn to toddler to child to teenager (pre- and post-pubescent) to premenopausal (reproductively viable) adult to to postmenopausal adult to senior to rickety old fart, the result is still genetically (scientifically) human, all else is just a matter of terminology and legal definition.
Even defining that embryo, less visually recognizable as a human being at that stage of development a 'less than human' doesn't justify the destruction of those after 8 weeks of development (now called a fetus) who are recognizably human, who have developed genitalia, fingers, toes, etc., and definitely not those who could survive a natural birth (or c-section), given basic support given to those born early. Two of my great grandchildren were born at 33 weeks due to complications (twins). They continued to develop and are in school now. The latest laws would allow the killing of children older, more fully developed, and even more likely to survive without any neonatal care beyond that given for a 'natural' full term birth.
While any sub group of humans can be excluded from that semantic definition of "human", and historically have been to justify murder on a grand scale, no slaughter so has been so grand in the history of the planet as that of the abortion mills right here in the USA. Keep in mind that other instances of slaughter on a grand scale were justified by first defining those to be killed as somehow less than "human", and it would be inconsistent to say that this is any different, just this time the victims can't fight back.
