XPost: alt.atheism, alt.abortion   
   From: someone@somewhere.com   
      
   I asked this of an anti-abortion/forced-birth/pro-life poster in another   
   thread, and never got a reply.  I sincerely would like some input from   
   someone who believes that life starts at conception, and first/second   
   trimester fetuses have a "right to life".   
      
   A fertility clinic fertilizes an egg, and allows it to divide once.  The   
   two daughter cells are separated, and one is frozen.  The other is allowed   
   to continue dividing, and is eventually implanted into a woman's uterus,   
   where it grows to term, resulting in a healthy baby and happy parents.   
      
   So, what *is* the other cell?  Is it a separate person, who has his/her   
   own "right to life"?  Or, is it just a cell, discarded from the person who   
   has already been born, as we shed cells all the time?   
      
   If it is its own person, why wasn't it its own person if it weren't   
   separated?  Are we all actually 100,000,000,000,000 separate people,   
   sharing the same body?   
      
   If it is not its own person, would it become a person if thawed, and   
   allowed to develop into a new fetus?  That would imply that personhood is   
   something that comes with a certain degree of development, which the   
   pro-lifers deny.   
      
   --   
   MarkA   
      
   If you can read this, you can stop reading now.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)