Life is a concept when it is detached from context.
This is how we get fooled. This is how we confuse ourselves, our thinking and our conclusions.
Each time we encounter a concept we clearly have to stop and make certain we are precise about the context before we engage in rational analysis or our inferences will bleed over into crossed-definitions.
Here is an example of mixing our concepts with our contexts.
1.A package of seeds for our vegetable garden.
2.A steaming plate of delicious vegetables.
Ask yourself the following question: "If I eat a package of seeds is it the same as eating a steaming plate of delicious vegetables?"
Answer: Of course not!
Why?
Because a chain of processes has not taken place which render the seed into a meal.
1.Planting the seeds in carefully prepared soil. (Planting in the right season and with enough sunlight, etc.)
2.Constant maintenance of the garden (removing insects, weeds, watering, nutrifying the soil, etc.)
3. Harvesting the vegetables, cleaning, washing and pre-meal preparations.
4.Steaming the veggies and adding seasoning.
A potential is not the same as an actual. Treating a potential and an actual as identical is illogical.
An embryo is a potential human being in the same way a carrot seed is a potential meal.
It is dishonest to use language and terminology which applies to actual things when only discussing potentials.
It is the habit and custom of propagandists deliberately to mix the two for their own agenda.
No woman ever had a child in her womb. Not really.
What a woman has in her womb at any given time is a transitional life-form which may or may not result in a viable birth.
Once born that life is a potential person because it hasn't acquired language, mental facility and identity as yet.
Self-hood comes gradually.
The fact that we give names to our newborn and shower them with language that really more precisely applies to more fully developed personhood often confuses the issues surrounding childhood.
As far as abortion is concerned. No discussion is honest when the language used in its terminology mixes the potential state of life with the actual eventual state after birth.
The failure, inability or unwillingness of people to deal with the reality of these matters stems directly from the confusion in their own mind between the value of life per se and the actual identification of what life is in the context of its value specifically applied to an actual person.
Meaning what?
Life only has value SPECIFICALLY.
The precise context makes all the difference.
Life has no value conceptually.
Futher, the idea that HUMAN LIFE is sacred (in the abstract) is a result of many semantic confusions.
Clearly, it is necessary once again to apply specific contexts.
Humanity is many things at different times. It can be beautiful at one time and place and monstrous in another. There is no such thing as __pure__humanity in and of itself.
HUMAN LIFE is only as valuable as it is noble and wise and pure. The less so; the less valuable per se.
An infant is potentially many wonderful things (eventually) and at that same moment many monstrous things (eventually).
Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Sadaam, Ted Bundy were all cuddly infants once.
Had they been aborted can the world collectively say it would have been an awful loss?
Clear thinking requires precision of context, definition and separation of potential and actual.
