All of that is why this push to recognize that one becomes a human being at conception is most scientifically and logically sensible. Other reference points along the development curve are too arbitrary in nature to even BE “points” at all, and the “magic birth canal” argument currently codified in Law is simply ridiculous on its face. The notion that one transitions from “not a human being” to “a human being”; from “having no rights” to “having rights” by passing through a tube — utterly stupid.
On that score, I would suppose that passing Eastward through the tunnel beneath the English Channel might make me a Frenchman endowed with all the legal trappings of a citizen of that country. It’s simply a preposterous idea.
No, FAR better to establish a definable, recognizable, testable, instant in time where one actually can be legitimately construed as having BECOME a “human being”; and the moment when all the necessary DNA that makes you you is first brought together is the only moment that meets those criteria, and that is conception.
Now too, as you point out, “person” and “human being” are two terms for exactly the same thing in context to speaking of the personhood of human beings; that one is a “person” is inherent in that one is a “human being.” So, when the egg becomes a human being is also when the egg becomes a person endowed by [his] Creator with certain inalienable rights; life chief among them. And science is unequivocal in asserting that the egg becomes a human being at conception, as that is the earliest definable instant where all of the requisite DNA is present together.
“All of that is why this push to recognize that one becomes a human being at conception is most scientifically and logically sensible.”
I think you make an interesting point if you add that it is *legally* sensible, a clearly definable milestone, before which (nearly) everyone would agree there was not a human being, and after which there is a moral danger that killing would amount to murder.
Still, is it a “self-evident truth” that a fertilized egg is a human being, and to kill it is murder? That still seems to me to be a matter to be argued or a matter of faith, not something immediately self-evident.
Let’s say that fertilized egg divides a few times, and then splits into twins, a non-hereditary phenomenon. Was it always two people, or did the moment of “conception” in that case begin with the splitting? If you chemically thwarted the blastocyst from splitting, did you “murder” one of the two twins? Which one? Reasoning of that sort leads me to think of a fertilized egg as a “potential person” rather than a full fledged “person”.
I don’t mean to be argumentative; we seem to be very nearly on the same page. Ultimately, though, I don’t think appeals to logic or science are going to settle the argument about abortion. I think what will win the argument in the end will be appeals to the heart, not the head.