> You should perhaps read more before just pretending it's a primarily religious position. By your own link, it's an overwhelmingly religious position. If you

> You should perhaps read more before just pretending it's a primarily religious position. By your own link, it's an overwhelmingly religious position. If you look at the issue globally it becomes even more obvious just how religious it is. I'm interested in the exceptions because they are relatively rare. > Almost every pro-life defense rests on the simple claim that a fertilized egg is human and has particular rights. Yes, this is exactly the problem. It takes the implications of "human" in well-established ethical systems and attempts to insert the definition of "human specimen" from modern biology. That's not a valid move. Ethicists didn't have embryos in mind when they discussed things like divine rights and deontology. I'm glad you brought up Aristotle, because he himself wrote on this subject: "...but when couples have children in excess, let abortion be procured before sense and life have begun; what may or may not be lawfully done in these cases depends on the question of life and sensation."[0] Aristotle didn't understand the specifics of embryos or implantation, but he was clearly capable of observing that there were stages very early in pregnancy where the thing growing did not yet have sensation, and then further stages where it had sensation but not the sensation of being human. This is astoundingly accurate; props to him. Applying modern biological definitions to the established ethics of old is anachronistic. You can't just look to the letter of the ancient law and swap definitions from modern, unrelated fields and expect the intent to survive. 0. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.7.seven.html http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.7.seven.html