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Remember Luke SkyFreeper's thread a week or two ago? He maintained that if we focus on punishment in these marginal cases like the ones you mention, we will lose public sympathy for the pro-life altogether. I agree with that but don't think it's an adequate reason to deny protection. I have a different reason which the others on this thread don't like because it does not involve science or articles of faith

My reasoning is very simply based on emotion. A normal human being upon hitting someone like that woman did would recognize that was a human they hit, and that human was in pain. That emotion of empathy is not precise or foolproof as we saw in the recent case. We need to cultivate that emotion in ourselves and others. One way to encourage it is to punish people who lack it.

There can be no such recognition in the case of a fertilized egg. A fertilized egg has no recognizable human features even under a microscope, has no neurons and feels no pain. When it dies it does not suffer.

I do not deny the power of faith-based morality, and the fact that faith-based morality underlies our legal framework. Perhaps like chickens and eggs, there's no way to determine which came first, but morality based on empathy is undeniable and powerful.

He maintained that if we focus on punishment in these marginal cases like the ones you mention, we will lose public sympathy for the pro-life altogether

In some Northern European countries there are laws against parents hitting a child.

But a parent who hits a child is not usually penalized.

I wish more of our lawmakers had the guts to at least say abortion is wrong, even if they can't accept the idea of punishing those involved.

http://www.cei.net/~rcox/hitting.html
Over five million European children are already protected from all physcial punishment in their home as well as in institutions. Five European countries - Sweden (in 1979), Finland (in 1983), Denmark (in 1985), Norway (in 1987) and Austria (in 1989) have adopted laws which prohibit parents hitting their children. The purpose in each case has been educational; to change attitudes, not to punish parents. There are no criminal penalties attached to the bans. The reforms have not led to a rush of children taking their parents to court over physical punishment, and numbers of children taken into care in Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries are low and reducing.

Agree. And the same for the implanted embryo, up to a point. Picking a point later for legal protection gets harder.

You wrote, "There can be no such recognition in the case of a fertilized egg. A fertilized egg has no recognizable human features even under a microscope, has no neurons and feels no pain. When it dies it does not suffer." I've been wanting to ask of you, do you realize that the conceptus, with first cell division from one cell to two, is no longer a 'fertilized egg' ... and that this cell division occurs while the conceptus is in the fallopian tube (normally) perhaps even days before the many-celled embryo implants in the lining of the woman's uterus? You use the term 'fertilized egg' as if it applies in the lifetime for days or weeks, rather than ONLY the first minutes of newly conceived individual human life.