"Cake" Is a Developmental Term

 

It sounds ludicrous at first glance.  Isn't cake just a type of food?  If cake is a type of food, how can the same word be merely a developmental term, referring to only one specific period in the entire "life span" of that food?

Let me ask another question: is cake batter...cake?  (Deep questions!)

A couple days ago on outreach with Created Equal, a woman told me, "A unviable clump of cells is not a human being."

(Side note: catch the grammar flaw?  Her mistake, not mine.  I must defend myself.)

Setting aside that we are not just "clumps of cells" even before we are viable (our heads begin to be discernible very early on - we only look like "clumps" for a very short amount of time, like maybe a couple weeks, after we are created), I want to focus on what else she was saying.

To claim that someone is not a human before they can live outside the womb is to say that in order to be a certain species, you have to be developed enough to be able to survive outside the womb...which also depends on the current level of medical technology.

To put it another way: whether you are a certain species depends on the current level of medical technology.  Or, to reach the point where you are a certain species depends on the current level of medical technology.

Huh?

Back to my interaction with this lady, I answered her, "They're at a lower level of development - that's why they're not viable.  They're still a human being."

To which she clapped back, "So if I handed you a bowl of cake batter, and said, 'hey, have cake...'"

Ah, and we are back to the cake.  (We [you and I] got on a bit of a rabbit trail, but only to lead us back.)

I thought her argument was actually pretty clever.  It's another version of the argument, "Is an acorn an oak tree?"

Most of us are inclined to say no, those are two different things, and that's where the abortion advocate says, "Aha!  And in the same way, a fetus is not a human!"

Oh, but don't you see?  Pointing to a point in their developmental journey of whatever species they are to say they are not that species makes no sense!

The truth is, cake batter and cake are not the same thing and acorns and oak trees are not the same thing in the same way that toddlers and adults are not the same thing.  Yet, they are both members of the same "species," just different levels of development.

We think of "cake" as that food as a whole, but really, that's just a developmental term.  "Cake" refers to the finished product.

"Oak tree" refers to the "adult version" of that organism, the same organism an acorn is.

"Adult" refers to a stage of development in the human life cycle, and so does "embryo" and "fetus" and "toddler" and so on.

As I said, I thought her argument was clever.  It could be easy to get tripped up on that one.  But it's simply a matter of confusing species (or type of organism) with developmental level.  And before-the-current-age-of-viability-age preborn childrens' developmental level is the reason they can't survive outside the womb, not that they're not the same species as we are.

Whenever you hear someone give an argument like this for abortion, remember: the fact that preborn children before about 24 weeks old (age of viability, for now, based on current medical technology) are unable to survive outside the womb says nothing about which species they are, only about which developmental stage they are currently in, in the framework of their species.