Just a history note: in Jamaica, during the time the English used slave labor there, all the slave women who became pregnant aborted their pregnancies so that their children wouldn't grow up in the world they were living in. The same would have been true in Brazil, but there were very harsh punishments for abortion there

It's not true that all women who have sought abortions denied the humanity of what they were killing, and this is still true today.

A member of a species has to be an organism, taken as a whole, of that species — Bob Ross


This is circular.

No it is not. In order for X to be a member of the set of all existent square blocks, it must be a square block.

This is basic biology. It is a member of the human species if it that certain kind of animal: homo sapien. — Bob Ross


Well, I wouldn't say that homo sapiens are single-celled animals.

This is basic biology: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Homo-sapiens . When, for you, does an organism become a member of its species? Anything you say is going to be utterly arbitrary, if it is not conception.

There are ways to tell: I was saying to the naked eye. We can examine it in the lab and determine if it is a human being (or, if you prefer, human fertilized egg).

In order for X to be a member of the set of all existent square blocks, it must be a square block. — Bob Ross

And to explain what it means to be a square block you describe the relevant geometry.

How do you explain what it means to be a Homo sapiens?

When, for you, does an organism become a member of its species? — Bob Ross

There is no point. It’s like asking when does a species branch into two? There’s just a bunch or organic matter arranged together and behaving in certain ways, and then for practical reasons we group collections of similar organic matter together under a single name.

There was never a point where a non-Homo sapiens simply gave birth to a Homo sapiens. The evolution into Homo sapiens was a gradual process where we can say at the one extreme that it wasn’t human and at the other extreme it is but then in between there’s a grey, ambiguous area and any attempt at a definitive classification is arbitrary.

How do you explain what it means to be a Homo sapiens?

a homo sapiens is a contradiction in terms: it is a species.

The typical definition of a species, which holds generally for its members and absolutely for its healthy members, is "A group of organisms that share similar physical and genetic characteristics and are capable of interbreeding to produce viable offspring".

"A group of organisms that share similar physical and genetic characteristics and are capable of interbreeding to produce viable offspring". — Bob Ross

A zygote is not physically similar to me.

This is a textbook example of circular reasoning.