And funny enough, the one user on this forum I can recall specifically trying to delineate between people and humans in the last couple weeks is the same user trying to justify Russia invading Ukraine with a whole bunch of disingenuous arguments meant to distract and mislead people from the core issue there.
That means nothing to me.
Assuming we're talking about Seanchaidh, I've said some pretty angry things to them (some of which I regret) and I think they're outright, dangerously wrong on the topic of Ukraine and imperialism. But I would attribute that less to some kind of personal evil than to the influence of a pernicious media environment that manipulates well meaning people. It's a slightly frightening reflection of how vulnerable we all are to the manipulation of our deeply held beliefs. In that regard, I don't think you're as different as you might want to pretend. I think you both have beliefs that you have staked your personal identity on and are resistant to self-reflection, and which have been effectively weaponized by bad-faith actors.
And this is not to absolve myself. I have no doubt that I have similar blind spots. I don't think any degree of academic training can really eliminate that completely. But what I'm saying is that I don't think arguments are bad just because of where they come from, because I think people who are normally rigorous and intellectually curious can still argue in bad faith on topics that are too close to their personal or political identities.
You can disagree with attempting to delinate between people and humans, but I don't doing so is a sign of a disingenuous argument. In fact, if you want to argue that human and person are synonymous, I will happily pick that apart, because I don't think personhood is that easiy to define, hence why it's not very useful in the context of this discussion.
Life is an absolute essential right that people need.
According to whom?
According to the UN and the US constitution, for example, we all have a right to life. This right to life has coexisted, in US history, with the institution of chattel slavery, with lynching, with capital punishment, with involvement of wars that have killed millions of people, with the development, use and proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, with the use of torture, with medical experiments on human beings, with indifference to the victims of epidemic disease, with rampant police violence, with mass-incarceration for non-violent crimes..
But even assuming we can take the right to life at face value. Why do we have it? What is the point in it?
The right to life is one part of a wider principle of human dignity, that all human beings possess intrinsic value and should be treated accordingly, hence why it appears alongside the right to liberty and the right to the pursuit of happiness. The right to life is not an abrogation of respect for human beings, it does not mean keeping terminally ill people alive so that they can suffer for longer. It does not mean never turning off life support to people whose brain stems are dead and letting them linger in a humiliating state until their bodies finally wear out. Life has value in the wider context of dignity, not to the exclusion of dignity.
A woman who gets pregnant is a person with an intrinsic right to dignity, not just to life. That same principle of human dignity holds that her body is not public property, but is hers to do with as she sees fit.
A fetus that does not have a working nervous system, that possesses no consciousness by which it can value its own existence or conceive of a desire to live or to die, may be a human, it may or may not be a person according to your standards, but it is only alive in the sense a braindead person is alive. Its dignity does not require us to keep it alive, especially not when that requires the violation of another person's bodily autonomy. That is not what the "right to life" means, if anything that is the abuse of the right to life in order to violate the dignity of someone else.
The things we age gate (getting railed, drunk, etc) are not only inessential, they are all things that are age gated specifically because they pose a threat to the person's life.
No they aren't.
Unless you are using life figuratively here, in which case well done you're beginning to get it, these things pose no more intrinsic risk of death than many things it is legal for a child to do, and to the extent they do pose a risk of death that risk often remains present into adulthood.
Death is not the problem here. There are bad things in the world other than death. In fact, as far as bad things go, death is really very gentle.