Saturday, October 19, 2024

"It's Only A Clump Of Cells"

Only logical axioms and, though it depends on logical axioms both metaphysically and epistemologically, one's own conscious existence are self-evident since one must rely on them to doubt or deny them.  Moral and scientific facts, as opposed to logically necessary facts about ideas concerning morality or science, are not self-evident or deductively demonstrable, although one can discover evidence for certain notions about them, recognize the contradictions and thus impossibility of others, and realize in any case what would or would not follow.  This is all by necessity the case with the concepts relevant to abortion.

If killing people for convenience or on a whim is murder, then it would not matter if they are inside the womb or outside of it.  What of whether a pregnancy entails the carrying and development of an actual human at any or all stages?  If the zygote, the ovum successfully fertilized by a sperm, is what will become a human outside the womb left to itself, it is a human at that stage of development no matter the biological particulars beyond this.  In fact, even the empirically supported concept of the gametes unifying in fertilization is unnecessary to realize that whatever is being developed during pregnancy would have to be a human in its current stage.  Without fertilization, though, a sperm and egg are not a person on their own, just the basic components to potentially create a new person.

Some people adhering to liberal philosophies might insist that what is inside the womb, especially a zygote, a blastocyst, or perhaps an embryo, is "only a clump of cells."  While abortion is hardly the most significant issue of morality and general metaphysics, amidst the often purely emotionalistic and non sequitur-riddled stances held by many conservatives and liberals on this subject, this is something that might be articulated sincerely as a justification for, should the mother wish, terminating a pregnancy.  Depending on the variant of pro-choice ideology, this might be regarded as morally permissible, up to the sole discretion of the mother, at any point in the pregnancy or up until some often sheerly arbitrary line is assumed.


Consciousness is immaterial [1] regardless of whether it metaphysically creates or sustains the body as with idealism or the body causes it to come into existence, as well as whether or not it outlives the body in any sort of unembodied afterlife.  However, at least according to the paradigm of today, the human body outside of the womb consists of up to trillions of cells depending on its age and size.  On a physical level, a zygote, blastocyst, embryo, fetus, newborn, and adult alike are still just "a clump of cells" if contemporary cell theory is true, just with differing numbers of cells.  Thus, if this is basis for there to be nothing immoral about killing the clump of cells that will eventually become a newborn even when the mother's life is not threatened, then there cannot be anything immoral about the mere killing of someone outside the womb, not if it too is convenient.

There is no way to prove that any human rights exist because there is no way to prove that morality exists, but the standard liberal positions on abortion are contradictory and thus logically impossible.  Some of the tenets or others could be true on their own, but not at once.  It might be true that there is nothing morally wrong with killing the group of cells that form a human, but it is not because the unborn would not be human or because only those outside the womb could have a right to live (contingent on them not committing any act that would render them deserving of execution), or else it would not be a matter of human rights.  If all living bodies are made of cells, then differences in appearance, size, and location would not make a human at an early developmental stage, including the zygote phase, less human than that of a more mature stage.


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