It’s the abortionist who would be imprisoned, not the woman. The idea that women would be imprisoned is a leftist fairy tale.
Also, viability is determined by technology and even social factors, not an inherent biological status. Is a newborn viable? After all, he/she can’t take care of him/herself. Within the womb, viability today is earlier in pregnancy than it once was. Babies haven’t changed, but technology has.
Viability is the point at which the baby can survive outside the womb, not the point at which the baby comes to life. The baby is alive and a unique individual from conception. There once was a concept called “quickening”, which meant enlivenment by a spirit. It was believed that the unborn baby wasn’t alive until a ghost entered into him/her. This occurred when the mother felt the baby’s first kick. The quickening idea was just superstition from an earlier era where people were ignorant of pre-natal life, DNA, and so forth, but this superstition survives to this day when people act as if viability is the point at which the unborn come to life. It’s really nothing of the sort. Life cannot spring from its absence. A new human life is created when live genetic material from two pre-existing humans merge at conception.
I respect your belief, but I do not share it. I believe that human life is much more than just physical, it is also spiritual. The human being gains his/her eternal spiritual life at the moment he/she takes his first breath outside the womb. Before that moment, it is a life in potential. That is my personal religious belief.
If a society really accepted that ALL fertilized eggs were FULLY realized human beings, then why do not the churches baptize all stillborns, all miscarriages, since Baptism is required for “eternal life”? Why did not early, staunchly Christian Americans give names to and record stillbirths in their Bibles?
I do not scorn your beliefs at all. I do respect them. But I do not share them. And, furthermore, your beliefs (and mine) about the beginning of human life are at core theological. Thus state and federal governments should keep their clumsy paws off this personal, ultimately religious issue. It must be resolved in the court of public opinion.