DarthCloakedGuy: Some people are parasites all their adult lives too, but all joking aside

I consider life to begin at conception. It's the only milestone that makes logical sense to me. Some would say it's when the heart starts beating, but you can be a human without a heart, and that's just one organ of many. Some would say it's when neural activity begins-- and that makes much more sense, but at the same time it's hard to gauge when it happens, my understanding is it's a fairly gradual process.

Others say it's when the baby exits the mother, which is the most bizarre to me, since it's just a change in location, nothing intrinsic.

But conception is the moment it meets all the criteria to be a unique, distinct, living human lifeform.

I disagree. Embryoes especially aren't unique and distinct. Hell, identical twins disprove the "from conception" argument, since the separation occurs one to five days after conception. I also find it hard to declare a parasitical bundle of cells provably distinct or living. Tumors are also distinct and living, but they aren't human. Chimeras are technically two unique and distinct living human lifeforms combined into one, and we don't consider them two people, though we do consider conjoined twins two people. It's way more complex than that.

And the fact that we can keep a braindead body "alive" or that you can be clinically dead but then come back to life makes it illogical to me to think that the sheer existence of DNA makes something human.

projectisaac I think we can all agree n-n-no human deserves any inherent right to exist, no-*burp*-thing gives a crap about anyone, and that all life is m-meaningless and painful anyway.