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If you can tell me exactly when human life begins and when it deserves protection. Then I'll agree, abortion is fine before that. But short of absolute certainty, you have to admit that abortion is potentially the murder of a child. I don't think it's worth taking the risk when a child's life is at stake.

Do you want absolute certainty again drunk driving? Then outlaw blood alcohol levels above 0.0% Want 100% certainty that nobody will ever get hit by a stray bullet? Then outlaw all firearms discharges. Obviously the law is a compromise designed to maximize the probability of a moral outcome; it recognizes 100% certainty is both physically and politically impossible.

Laws that protect certain stages of life are going to be compromises over what that stage represents to most people (or their representatives), and I don't believe that religious distinctions are going to be politically acceptable. Science also doesn't say what life stage should be protected, it is amoral. I believe the inevitable compromise will be to protect humanity.

Here's a few crude tests: can you picture holding it in your hand? That's possible with most of the pictures we've seen, but hard to imagine with a cell. Can you feel a sense of loss? I honestly don't know about that for the loss of a cell, but at the very least I think most women would not be aware of it. It would be an abstract loss for them. What would its death be like? A cell can't feel anything, won't react, and won't care. Do these single celled humans die normally? Yes, it happens all the time.

Again, you've raised an interesting point, palmer! In any given menses cycle a woman and her husband might bring about fertilization and a new life, but that new life may fail to implant in the uterine wall. This is the earliest form of a miscarriage and there are devices as well as pills which can cause this process to prevent an ongoing pregnancy. This 'natural' miscarriage process does throw some kink in the argument for life protection from conception onward, but consider this: acknowledging that nature does sometimes fail to support nascent life, does that give we humans the right to force such an action, circumventing nature? And as this issue impacts our manipulations of embryos, should we be messing with individual human life, to manipulate it for exploitative purposes then discard that exploited individual human life?

I'm encouraged by the debates here regarding a possible compromise over legality of something tragic and currently far from humane, abortion policy in America.

Are you seriously comparing the threat of someone with 0.00001% blood alcohol level with sucking an unborn child's brains out with a vacuum? The threat from people with 0.00001% blood alcohol level can be studied with statistics and we can definitely state that the threat is virtually nonexistant. You don't have any kind of certainty about when life begins or what the odds are of abortion being a murder. You're willing to put a child's life at risk without ANY evidence or information. That's what I call reckless.

What would its death be like? A cell can't feel anything, won't react, and won't care. Do these single celled humans die normally? Yes, it happens all the time.

At first, the nervous system develops fastest. The ectoderm folds over to form a neural tube, or primitive spinal cord. At 3.5 weeks, the top swells to form a brain. Production of neurons (brain cells that store and transmit information) begins deep inside the neural tube. Once formed, neurons travel along tiny threads to their permanent locations, where they will form the major parts of the brain (Caesar, 1993).
pg. 105, "Infants and Children: Prenatal Through Middle Childhood", by Laura E. Berk, Copyright 1999 Allyn & Bacon

At 3.5 weeks, we know human brain cells are present in the unborn child. I'm not talking about a single cell, I'm talking about a living human organism with functional human brain cells. Is that worthy of protection?