HB 1572 would literally make anything causing a human cell to die into a murder. So don’t even think about stem cell research.  Or cancer treatment.  Or surgery — wouldn’t want to carelessly slice away a few cells now.

I normally don’t see too much fault with what Johnathan writes.  For instance, his writing against the UND Pride Card has been pretty good.  That isn’t to say that I always agree with him either.  But he’s entitled to his first amendment rights just as much as I am, right?  But, in this I really think he’s a little too extreme.

First, let’s start with the actual wording of the bill:

References to individual, person, or human being – Legislative
intent. For purposes of interpretation of the constitution and laws of North Dakota, it is the
intent of the legislative assembly that an individual, a person, when the context indicates that a
reference to an individual is intended, or a human being includes any organism with the
genome of homo sapiens.

While I can see where Johnathan (or whomever he got is information from) could have gotten his idea, there needs to be a little scientific exploration.  The definition of an organism according to dictionary.com:

An individual form of life that is capable of growing, metabolizing nutrients, and usually reproducing. Organisms can be unicellular or multicellular. They are scientifically divided into five different groups (called kingdoms) that include prokaryotes, protists, fungi, plants, and animals, and that are further subdivided based on common ancestry and homology of anatomic and molecular structures.

I don’t think I need to point to the definition of a human, so let’s just go with a given of the genus of homo sapian being a multicellular organism.  Now, since the bill states that the “human being” as defined by the legislature is “any organism with the genome of homo sapiens”, and we know that homo sapiens are multicellular, we can also infer that killing a single human cell would not constitute murder since there would still be zillions of cells remaining.  Even mass cellular killing (e.g. binge drinking as refered to by Johnathan) couldn’t be classified as murder.  You could try and make the arguement for attempted murder, but you’d lose that as well.  Binge Drinking can kill in some extreme cases, but would be classified as a suicide in most cases, I think.

Without bringing in my religious beliefs (I’m pro-life) and looking at this strictly from a scientific, logical standpoint, I don’t see how anyone could come to the conclusion that this bill would make us all murderers.