I guess you didn't complete high school biology and/or don't have a rudimentary grasp of logic.
A zygote/early embryo is:
Asystolic by virtue of not having a heart
Brain dead by virtue of not having a brain
By those criteria, an embryo is less alive than an asystolic, brain dead accident victim who is being artificially perfused while his organs are harvested. Is he alive? The 'brain dead' part suggests not.
An embryo is biologically no more human than a liver cell or skin cell. Skin cells die all the time... you're covered by them. Does this mean that skin cells are human beings and it's evil to kill them?
I suggest you'll now note that a skin cell won't become a person left to its own devices. Quite fallacious, indeed. The numbers I've seen suggest that between 60 and 80% of fertilized zygotes do not make it to birth (either dying before implantation or spontaneously aborting).
So, I would say it's fundamentally untenable to insist unilaterally that 'basic science proves zygotes are human babies' as well as an odious misuse of science for religious purposes.
Further, to cross into the social sciences, it could be plausibly argued that even at birth a child of human parents is not 'human.' Abandoned, left to its own, it will not resemble in adulthood anything you or I associate with 'humanity'. Fortunately, such feral children are quite uncommon, but the point is clear. Without the early childhood education in humanity, a child will never learn to speak. Human DNA does not guarantee humanity.
But that is tangential to the point. What matters is that zygotes are not 'living beings', are not the same as human children. Anyone who would contend otherwise must seriously underestimate the profoundness and beauty of life.
Holy crap, you're one of those people who thinks a living breathing healthy infant is not human!
You are twisting science to fit your social view that abortion is acceptable.
Human beings start as two single cells that combine their DNA to a single fertilized cell that is a new human being. That cell undergoes instantaneous division, cell diversification happens, et al. Of course a single fertilized cell doesn't have a brain, but 9 months later the child that pops out DOES have a brain. Certainly we can talk about the various developmental stages and cell diversification and the earliest formations of things like eyes, the brain, et al.
But fundamentally, the thing you overlook is the thing I cannot; to your point that from the single-cell phase to the point where the zygote/embryo has not yet developed a brain or a beating heart. What magic external event occurs that suddenly makes a heart that beats, or a brain that processes information? Answer -- there is none. The magic event is fertilization. There is no secondary external event that suddenly makes the developing baby "human". Therefore it always is. Everything that happens is locked away inside that single fertilized cell. Fertilization is neccessary and sufficient in the natural course (aside from implantation in the uterus of course).
I would say that anything that grows and undergoes cellular mitosis is alive, starting at the most basic microbiological level.
A skin cell does not produce a human being left to its own devices (well not until we continue pushing the envelope with cloning). A fertilized egg does.
You believe in twisting a cold, clinical definition of "alive" to determine a developing baby is "not human". I believe in the logical inscrutability of the impossibility of something that is not human becoming human without a distinct, verifiable and observable external stimulus. Especially when, left to the normal course of natural development, said "unviable tissue mass" becomes a baby. What is this magic event that makes something not human become human? And can we apply it to a skin cell, a dog, a salt shaker?
To return to civility (it's hard not to get charged about such a fundamental debate), I guess it comes down to kinetic (is this mass of cells "human" right now) versus potential (it will be, left to the natural course of events, and therefore it is and always was). And fundamentally I don't see a magic external event that makes something non-human become human, especially when we can have arguments about what "human" actually is -- such as your argument that a living breathing human may be declassified as human based on socialization. Therefore, logically it must extend to creation (fertilization). We can't make skin cells or plant cells or salt crystals become a human being.
The corollary to this is the following: how does something that is "not alive" become alive? Again this magical non-existent external stimulus. How does something that is not alive suddenly and fuzzily become alive, what is the magical event that happens? If we can answer that question, then we hold the key towards the animation of nonliving substances. The answer, of course, is that it always was alive.
. I think that the argument is about as much bullshit as McCain's campaign trying to paint Barack Hussein Obama as a terrorist, but if they want to play in the mud then the Obama campaign can't ignore it. That's one thing that screwed Kerry and Gore; their unwillingness to really respond to negative campaigning.
