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"Of course, the usual argument by many conservatives that abortion should be left up to the states is completely specious and immoral.

Whether or not innocent people live or die is not a matter for the polls."

Whether innocent people live or die is not the crux of the argument. The crux of the argument is, when does human life begin. So long as pro-lifers insist on ignoring that this is the core disagreement, pro-lifers and moderate proponents of abortion will perpetually be talking past one another.

Moderate proponents of abortion agree with the idea that killing innocent people is bad and should be illegal. That is not where they disagree with you. They disagree with you on when the entity becomes a person.

We can almost all agree that killing an innocent person is bad and should be forbidden nation-wide.

We can almost all agree that killing a baby after birth is bad (Peter Singer excluded).

We can almost all agree that contraception *prior* to conception is perfectly acceptable (for example, condoms, -- I know that people oppose the pill on the grounds that it sometimes prevents a fertilized egg (that is, post-conception) from implanting, so opposition to the pill is in the realm of contention between the two points).

What we are having a lot of trouble agreeing on is at what point in between those two points (inclusive of those two points) an entity becomes a person, and what about any chosen point makes it the crucial point.

This is not an easy issue. It gets into what makes a human human, and what qualities of human beings have that cause them to deserve rights and legal protections, and slippery slopes, and so on. These are largely deep religious and philosophical questions. Religious and philosophical questions of this sort are notoriously difficult with regards to obtaining an answer that can be found, with warrant, to be true, and they are (relatedly) notoriously difficult for large numbers of free people to come to a consensus on. Therefore, so long as people have disagreements on religion and philosophy, and have difficulty obtaining objective warrant for one position or another, they are likely to have deep disagreements on this issue.

The idea of giving this issue to the states -- letting the people of each state decide where, how they will regulate between those two points, but keeping it federally fixed beyond either of those two points -- is one proposed way of dealing with the fact that this is a difficult issue more likely, if left to the federal government, to continue to wreak havoc in civil life than to be resolved any time soon.

We are all perfectly welcome to disagree with this, of course, but if we do, one way to prevent perpetually, uselessly, endlessly, talking past opponents is to admit that the point of contention is not whether killing innocent people is bad and should be forbidden by the federal government (to reiterate, the vast majority of Americans agree with this). Rather, we should admit that the disagreement is over whether the entity created upon conception is a full-fledged human being, and why or why not, and if not at what point does it become so, and why?

The upshot of this is that, if you believe conception in and of itself yields a person deserving of legal protections, you will be more effective if you give your opponent your reasons for believing this. Accusing them of simply being in favor of killing innocent people is a total waste of time, that does not at all address the point at which their perspective differs from yours.

This is not an easy issue.

Yes it is. 100 hundred years everyone realized that an unborn child was a unborn child - not an "aggressive growth" or a "tissue mass."

Everyone knows that the second/third trimester distinction drawn by the USSC is a purely arbitrary construct.

A human zygote is a human zygote precisely because it contains a complete and self-contained human genetic code.

There are no objective criteria by which to determine that a zygote is "not yet" human but that an embryo is, or a fetus is, or a newborn is, or a two year old is, etc.

There is no natural, objective dividing line that tells us that at 11:53:21 April 25, 2006 individual X is not yet human but at 11:53:22 April 25, 2006 they are now magically human.

A distinct human being is alive from conception until natural death and all attempts to divide this timeline into human/nonhuman are purely arbitrary and completely specious.

You reference Singer in passing - the meat of Singer's argument in favor of infanticide is that any qualitative criteria that can be established as defining "humanness" - self-awareness, capacity for language, physical autonomy and independence, etc. do not apply to newborns or the developmentally disabled any more than they do to unborn children.

Why should someone get charged with murder for killing a kid the night they take him home from a hospital when they could get away with having him killed at the same hospital the previous evening?

Anyone who claims that the unborn are not human is lying to others and to themselves.

The truth is abvious to anyone not engaged in special pleading.