Gil, I shall leave it to other readers, with a more questioning and impartial frame of mind, and who will bother to read ALL the posts AND who possess a memory to remember them between the time they start the page and the time they reach YOUR comment, to decide if I ever claimed that DNA was a person. It is to accuse me of ignorance of biology. Again, I will leave it to those other readers to decide who REALLY knows, demonstrates, and attempts to argue based on a knowledge of biology, and who does not.

Did YOU bother to read BOTH posts? I invited ALAN, a male, to scratch a female's arse. DNA would be the way to determine if the cells under his fingernails was his or his boss's wife's. I did not say, as you imply I claim, that his Boss's wife is now under his fingernails. And it is a known fact that identical twins are of the same sex. Reducto ad absurdum works against the question only if you show that MY supporting argument is contradictory by being absurd, not if you use the Straw man fallacy, assert I used different premises (identical twins),
and THEN prove the resulting argument as absurd. Nor has Alan disproven the proposition that a zygote is deserving of the same protections as adults despite its stage of development by Reducto by merely DECLARING it absurd: The question of whether it is absurd or not is implied by the argument under question. Declaring it absurd and then claiming to have disproven it via Reducto is itself the fallacy of Arguing in a circle.

While on the subject of Reducto, I point out that, when responding to the proposition that a human zygote (fertilized egg) is deserving of the same protections as an adult human being (which, in the current legal environment is a synonym for being a "privileged" person),
it is NOT proving contradiction or absurdity to say that the logical consequence will be that it will be required that all human eggs and all human sperm MUST be joined into human zygotes. The question revolves around how a human zygote should be treated after it is created, not the irrelevant (and purposefully distracting) question of whether a human zygote is to be created in the first place, and whether failing to so is a violation of the rights of a human being that doesn't yet exist. For the record, I personally have no problems whatsoever violating the dignity, rights or sancitity of the minds or bodies of nonexistent human beings, and will vigorously defend the right of existing human beings to do the same against non-existent human beings.

However, just because you don't see it, doesn't PROVE that it doesn't exist. Hell, in science, sometimes even SEEING it still doesn't prove that it exists!

(And don't pull a dowdism by quoting my statement and removing "nonexistent" from the sentence. I don't think anyone here is that big of a prick, but don't disappoint me, please.)

While on the meta-subject of proof, I should point out the prediliction of using the word "person" instead of "Human being" upon which you and others insist upon. Before Roe Vs. Wade, if you had bothered to ask anyone on the street, they would have said that the two were synonyms for the same set of human beings. The Supreme Court did not PROVE that there was a real difference. They DECLARED that the two terms were different. It was argumentum ad baculum appeal to the stick of their authority. I remind people that such arguments have declared fallacious, and that it is okay to ignore the "argument". (That doesn't mean that their proposition is right or wrong, just that they were lazy and took a stupid short cut.)

I have no objections to Alan blowing his nose or scratching is own arse and rendering havoc to his own cells, since they can be provably shown to be his own via their DNA. "I can do what I want with my own body" is axiomatic and is not being questioned here. PROVING its ONLY your own body you're mucking around with is a far different matter. Let us not resurrect the old chestnut that "The baby is part of the woman's body, and she can do what she wants with her own body, so abortion is not wrong." Please leave THAT old nag where Biology shot and buried her. If you wish to debate the issue of "what if the mother cloned herself?", then you are free to do so, but how would any conclusions we reach debating THAT side issue apply in the (vast) majority of pregnancies where the mother did NOT clone herself?

I will leave it to others to decide if Alan's appeal to technology that currently exists only in the future as moral justification for behavior taking place in the here and now, is persuasive.

I suppress the temptation to make a snide comment about the cognitive facilities of pro-abortionists, and instead must marvel at the non-appearance of a pro-abortion derivative of the troll: Past experience on Usenet made me expect one to have popped up three days ago. This is a credit to the visitors to this site: We may disagree, and may try hard to push our viewpoints, but I, for one, feel that the discussion has been civil so far.

Ptah