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I agree with your statements regarding a non-fertilized egg. When you introduce the "up to 3 months it is a fetus and not a baby" statement though, you have changed the argument considerably. Is 2 months and 3 weeks not a baby, while 3 months and 1 week is? The arbitrary nature of this approach is troubling, because it doesn't adequately address the definition of a "baby." Using 3 months can't satisfy either side of the debate if the argument is truly about human life versus women's rights. It is a compromise that effectively accomplshes nothing with respect to the real debate.

Using 3 months can't satisfy either side of the debate if the argument is truly about human life versus women's rights.

I will admit that it is not clear when a fetus becomes a human. In my mind it is somewhere between month 3 and month 6.

There are some guide lines created by society.

One guide line is when can a person who murders a pregnant woman be also charged with the homicide of the fetus. Generally this is when the woman in noticably pregnant, the baby is moving and responding to external stimulus. These effects are normally first seen between month 3 and 6.

Another guide line is when do people treat a miscarried fetus as a normal deceased person. By this I mean, giving the deceased a name, putting the deceased in a casket, have a funeral, wake, burial and marking the grave with a tombstone. Certainly these sort of rituals are almost never carried out for miscarried fetuses in the first trimester. As ugly as it may sound, most first trimester fetuses end up flushed down a toilet. Certainly no one who truely believed that a first trimester fetus was a full human being would tolerate flushing that human being down a toilet.

Thus, I have to conclude that a fetus is clearly not a human being during the first trimester. Exactly when the fetus becomes a human after the first trimester is not clear to me.

my law partner was talking about a surrogacy case he was handling. I won't do them for a variety of reasons, two main ones are - invetro creates more than one baby etc. and surragacy is high tech prostitution. anyhway, Joe will handle them and was trying to remember the word for a very early fetus to tell me and my office manager some story and was saying, "right after conception, I forget what you call it." and I said "Joe, Mrs. K and I call it a baby." It was a totally good moment. Having said that, I'm looking to see why this is more than contraception. I am now safely past child bearing and believe that natural family planning is best but am not morally opposed to contraception for others but once that conception happens, it changes. i.e.... IUDs are bad, birth control pills are not good but I don't think that they are totally evil.