At this point, I’m not focused on legal interpretations and what the state does or doesn’t do.
I’m focused on the challenge of biblical interpretation for life beginning at conception.
I believe that I just proved it to a BIBLICAL CHRISTIAN, and that it wasn’t esoteric.
One must ask at which point the “in utero, incarnate, second person of the trinity” was NOT life.
But that is the point of the thread. The issue is what do we do in cases of rape or incest? Do we outlaw any procedure which would stop the embryo from attaching itself to the uterus because that would be murder?
The legal question then becomes, when and why would we call that murder and under what circumstances, if any should we conclude that anything less than a viable fetus is a "life" that must be protected at the expense of the liberty of the mother?
Now you can make a theological argument that life begins at the moment of conception, but then that argument is not concrete. You have to have a "secular" definintion in order to restrict the liberty of the mother. It also has to be a definition that will appeal to the vast majority of the citizens of this country.
Since we measure the end of life by the last heartbeat, it is not unreasonable to measure the beginning of life by the first heartbeat. This would solve the issue of what to do in cases of rape as there are means of keeping the egg from attaching to the uterus even before the first heartbeat.
But to deny a rape victim the opportunity to prevent a pregnancy that has not yet occurred is not going to go over too well with the majority of citizens in this nation.
So then the question becomes are we willing to continue to allow indiscriminate abortion on demand because we must insist that we need to protect the life of an embryo that has not yet even attached itself to it's mother's womb?