Those are good questions. The Christian in me answers, “It is life!”
But not everyone is a Christian. Many believe it is a lump of flesh with potential for life. I think, by the evidence, that you can reasonable prove life exists at about 20 weeks, since deliveries are possible then - although sustaining the life is difficult. But arguably, by 20 weeks (4 1/2 months) one can show the womb is nothing more than a superb life-support system.
As medicine advances, I think it will be increasingly clear that life has already begun at conception. But as a limited government type, I am uncomfortable with putting my religious views into law.
For this stage, I’d be content to say that we know life has begun by 20 weeks, and leave it to personal choice before that - barring advances in medical science that could show life begins earlier than that.
My political guess is that many states would leave things where they are at, but perhaps half would increase restrictions on abortion - a step in the right direction far likelier than the SC outlawing abortion!
Nothing I wrote depends in the slightest on religion. What are you smoking. It’s straight philosophy: what is something? Something cannot be nothing. So if it becomes (comes to BE, IS) human at some point after conception, what WAS (what did it used to BE) before that point? It wasn’t (did not used to BE) a frog. It WAS not an imaginary human life. It WAS not a theoretical goldfish. Among the universe of things it might have BEEN, what’s wrong with the assertion that it WAS then what it IS now: a human life? Unless you can identify clinically, biologically, philosophically some line of demarcation by which the “thingness” changes from non-human to human, you have to say that it was human from the moment it WAS anything.
And NONE of that has anything whatsoever to do with religion.
Faith aside, an unborn baby is either alive or dead, and either human or not.
It can easily be determined that the baby is, in fact, alive, and human.