By buying my son an XBOX I am not diminishing te ethopians humanity any more than Oprah is diminishing mine by have gourmet chefs prepare food for her dog.

Now if I make the ethopian my property I am valueing my own humanity over his.

The same resources could have been used to save the ethiopian kid. You are happy to force responsibility to a raped ethiopian women by preventing them to have an abortion, but nobody has a responsibility to take care of the ethiopian woman or the kid?

You admit you prefer your wife over all others. Would you have a random ethopian killed if it meant saving the life, happiness, and well being of your wife? Assume you could not get caught/prosecuted and any other necessities to prevent nit picking.

Yeah, Stu, that's pretty much what it boils down to. If you defend the unborn, you should also defend them throughout their life as well. Forcing somebody to have a child and not actively helping them after the birth, that's a huge problem with the pro life position.

The need to take care of the ethopian woman can be elimated the same way the need to care of her unborn child is. Just have the ethopian woman killed. Cluster bombs could solve world hunger.

I don't disagree with you that the bible does not specifically state when life begins. I guess it is implied that life begins at the beginning! For the same reason that I don't see that you could justify killing a 1 year old because the bible is not specific, I don't see that you could justify abortion.

Life begins at conception. Claiming that life starts at any other point is just arbitrary.

My argument would be as follows. Let me know where you disagree.

1. Life begins at conception.
2. Murder is the destruction of life
3. The bible condemns murder
4. Abortion is the destruction of the fetus or embryo after conception.
5. (from 1,2,4) Abortion is the destruction of life, therefore is murder.
6. (from 3,5) The bible condemns abortion.

Why didn't God just make it clearer, since he went to such trouble to talk about what bugs are unclean and which are ok, and what should be done to homosexuals? He either

1. Is incompetent
2. Didn't care
3. Wrongly thought it was obvious

Which is it?

Also, I submit that pro lifers in this thread who argue that a fetus is the same as a human being and abortion the same as genocide don't really believe that. There have been 17,000,000 abortions this year already, nearly as many as all deaths including natural ones. Another one is happening every second.

If a genocide on that scale was happening in the US and elsewhere, would you really be sitting at your computer playing poker and discussing religion, or spending most of your time trying to stop it? If your pregnant friend announced she was going to take someone to a murder clinic and have them murdered, would you sit by and let it happen, or would intervene? If thousands of genocide practitioners lived among us, each killing hundreds of humans each year, and receiving public funding for it, would you really not do everything you could to stop it?

I submit that you do not really believe that a fetus is a human being, despite what you claim.

why doesn't life begin when sperm are created? Sperm are alive. It seems like stating life starts at conception is just arbitrary.

I don't see how you can say this with a straight face.

The same applies for the fetus, especially the very early stages.

They are discriminating against pre-fertilized people.

Also if life begins at conception, how should we deal with monozygotic twins? Are they one human being that was split into two, so killing one of them is just killing half a human being or what? Did God bring another soul when the embryo split?

I'm sure God can figure out the twins/soul thing. I'm not sure what he does for this situation though:

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=2346476&page=1

Many people (myself included) believe that "human life" begins once the fetus can survive on its own without being attached to an umbilical cord.

There is nothing "arbitrary" about this belief.

I disagree with #1.

Life began at abiogenesis. Claiming that life starts at any other point is just arbitrary.

I am semi-serious.

Life began in the garden of Eden. Everybody who says otherwise should be burned for herecy.

Would you charge women who have abortions with murder? What about women who drink or smoke or harm the fetus with prescription drugs. Would you charge them with assault?

I dont care for abortion. But this is where i get tripped up.

#2 is also way off. Murder is not "the destruction of life", or I'm doing murder right now by breathing. Murder is the illegitimate taking of human life that has a conscious, self aware entity associated with it [even if temporarily asleep, passed out, etc]. The conscious entity association is required since things like Hela cells are indeed human life.

I don't think that passing laws is going to really help the situation. I have heard that something like 70% of abortions are from poor women. Maybe a more effective strategy would be to help the poor.

Now if you are asking could the government justifiably pass a law that would call abortion murder, yes. But I am not concerned with the law really. My stance has nothing to do with the law, nor do I feel the need for other people to be punished for what I have personally deemed immoral.(baring in mind that there are many situations that I would not want to find myself in)

Okay, my point is that its strange that being pro-life is so common among evangelicals when it doesn't seem to be a view based on Biblical support. You argue that it is based on the Bible, but in doing so you appeal to only one Biblical principle--that murder is wrong. But yet almost everyone that is pro-choice agrees with this principle. So if both evangelicals and non-evangelicals accept this principle, you haven't explained why they disagree about abortion.

Incidentally, (2) is obviously false.

First, you are right that two is vague. I should have made it a more specific claim (only spent 2 min writing that so that's what I get). We can change it to

2. Murder is the unjustified destruction of a human life.

As far as why they disagree, I am not sure what you are looking for here. The disagreement is on when life starts. I think that it is arbitrary and unjustified to say that life starts anything other than at conception. I cannot give you a reason why people would think differently as I have never heard a justified case for this.

He might as well say life begins when a star creates a carbon atom.

Conception and the resulting zygote is the first moment/thing you can point to as a new and distinct organism.

really? spermatazoa aren't new and distinct organisms?

They are gamete cells of an existing organism.

they're still alive and swim around