Someone is wrong on the internet!

[llennhoff]

Lured by a metaquotes post, I was browsing through the antitheism community. I found an example of bad reasoning (in support of a conclusion I agree with *sigh*). I went to post a reply when I discovered that the community only allows members to post. So I thought I would post it here instead:

I saw this question posed in one of the threads from your

Comments

[llennhoff]

I'd probably hammer on the logical absurdities of considering an embryo as a full human being. There was an lj post about this recently in connection with North Dakota passing a law considering a fetus to be a full human being in every respect. The best suggestion I remember from that discussion is that one can influence congressional districting in North Dakota (a very low population state) by siting fertility clinics in the districts you want to have greater influence. While the embryos cannot vote, if they are full people they should count towards the census and thus the population for allocating state representatives should change by a few 10s of thousands.

I don't know of any workable simple analogies, because I don't think this is a simple case. You might point out that many embryos are created but never used and ask what should be done with them. Are the taxpayers obligated to support their staying frozen forever? Should the parents' rights end at some point (perhaps after they are dead) and then they should be implanted in (hopefully willing) host wombs? Is it preferable that the embryos be flushed and thus die for no reason at all than that in death they may serve society. Warning - this last can quite legitimately lead you bad places wrt using the elderly for medical experimentation, so be careful.

[mlittlej]

Oh yeah, I heard about that, of course they want it to challenge Roe v. Wade, and I'm not sure they'll let a little detail like logical absurdity get in their way. That is a very good point though. During the discussion of the personhood amendment in Colorado I heard some other very silly consequences of a fetus or embryo being given personhood - do we need to arrest pregnant women who drink coffee for child endangerment?

I just figured if I went there she would say, "And that's why in vitro fertilization is wrong!" A lot of those fundies think it is. Not that that answer would really answer the question, of course, I'd have to keep pressing. Arguing with these people is so tiring sometimes.

[isolani]

I think I would generally argue that embryos have some level of independent moral standing (with how much really depending on a lot of factors) - but treating them as if they had personhood leads to utterly absurd consequences.

I`m always irked by questions like 'would you save a child or 500 embryos' - basically if you have to think about that while the building is burning you're doing something wrong. Very wrong.