A living human at any stage of growth

I am not certain what the point of Simon Oosterman’s letter (No Human Life At Conception, Feburary 12) is but it is so replete with misguided statements I feel someone should correct at least the worst of them.

i) Eggs and sperm are living cells but remain the product of another’s body. Unlike a fertilised egg, they are not independent entities.

ii) A human being does not become more alive or more human as they progress – they just get older. Stating that a living human being only becomes so at any stage after conception suggests that, at any earlier stage, this person is either less human or less living or both. The absurdity contained within this supposition is manifestly obvious.

As for acorns and oak trees, apart from the obviously dehumanising and demeaning implications of comparing a human being to an oak tree, it remains perfectly acceptable, biologically speaking, to look upon an acorn as an oak tree in its earliest stage of development and vice-versa.

iii) On souls (and the cheap attempt to write off a living human embryo as “a clump of a few cells”), I would ask Mr Oosterman to define a soul and how much living space it needs in order to exist comfortably. Once he has accomplished this, he will find he has answered his own question.

iv) Finally, whereas both political parties have, as Mr Oosterman correctly points out, declared themselves against abortion, this is by no means a guarantee that either one of them may not change their mind in the future. The proposed change to the Constitution will simply make this harder to accomplish.