Tac is presenting a false dichotomy, mixed with a straw man, when he said the following: "You get two choices, they aren't children till they talk/write/sign/whatever, or they are children the instant the cells start dividing. Anything inbetween is arbitrary and wrong."

It's definitely not the majority view that a child needs to be able to communicate in order to be considered sentient. (Heck, some humans live their whole lives unable to use language. They are considered disabled, but otherwise eventually attain the rights of a human adult.) The two most common views on the "crossing the human/nonhuman Rubicon" point are:

1) Human at conception. This is primarily a religious viewpoint, but some scientists use it on the grounds that this is a gray area we should not tread in, and should therefore choose the most inclusive definition of life.
2) Human at the point of detectable neural activity, which is somewhere around 18 weeks of pregnancy, and is definitely way before birth. This is also a conservative definition-- we don't have a meaningful way to assess whether the electrical activity in the fetal brain is really 'thinking', per se. As for Tac's claim that this definition is "arbitrary and wrong", it is prominently championed by a number of heavyweights, it forms some of the basis of our existing abortion laws, and it's consistent with how we treat the severely disabled, or people in comas (barring pre-existing legal agreements, i.e. "living wills"). My impression from the bioethics literature is that this is the most commonly held opinion, but is not unanimous.

I've never heard anyone espouse the "Fact:" Tac is espousing about communication being the dividing line, and it's so extreme that I suspect it's intentionally exaggerated to make the alternative (which it itself not nearly the only alternative) seem like the only tenable ground. He's basically saying "Either you oppose all abortion (and some contraception), or you advocate killing 1-year-olds." Quite obviously there is a middle ground. (Nep's position is extreme in the other direction, which I suspect he recognizes.)

valguarnera@carrionfields.com