Flipper,

"flipper" wrote in message
...
Your argument might have had at least the appearance of 'scholarly' if
you had left in the definition you attempt to critique.

Just trying to convserve bandwidth.

"Living fetus" is accurate, unobscure, and to the salient point

No, it's kinda weasely. Try using it (the entire definition) in wikipedia
somewhere (other than a quote, obviously), and see how fast it takes before
it's labeled as weasely.

while your
"organic cell mass" is precisely the thing you claim, "weasel words,"
in an attempt to obfuscate.

Yes, exactly, that was my point! "Organic cell mass" is just as bad as
"living fetus." In a proper definition, one might reasonably say "living
fetus" one of twice, but the definition you quoted clearly belabors the point
in an attempt to bias the reader's reaction.

What you are doing is a version of "false equivalency" where every
irrelevant 'similarity' between things is discussed while summarily
ignoring all matters of substance.

Again, exactly my point: You can't decide whether or not (or when) it's OK to
abort babies/fetuses/call masses/whatever-they-are based strictly on
biological consideration.

But it is precisely all the things you chose to summarily ignore that
differentiate a human being from a dead tree stump and while you may
not find 'much difference' between the two I dare say the rest of the
human race does.

Agreed, they do... although I'm not sure you want to persue that line of
reasoning with respect to deciding when or if abortions are OK because you
then rapidly get into the rather sticky area of trying to decide whether or
not, e.g., deformed or severaly retarded fetuses or even born babies deserve
any protection under the law. Or maybe you do... I would admit that there are
not really any easy answers in this area.

If you see no distinction between murdering another human being vs
killing a chicken then you have a lot more ethical and moral problems
than dealing with the abortion question.

I see a distinction, my point was just that the singular fact that aborting
(some) fetuses stops a beating heart doesn't persuade me that abortion is good
or bad... plus I then get annoyed at the manipulation attempted, especially
after realizing it's not even a true statement. It's almost as ridiculous a
bumper sticker as, e.g, "Not aborting a severely retarded baby will cost tax
payers an average of a million dollars over the life of the child, which will
cause 10 other already-born children to die from being unable to afford health
care." -- It *might* be true (although of course here I'm just making up the
numbers), but it shouldn't really influence the discussion of whether or not
abortion is OK.

---Joel