The 'discussion' so far is bordering on the ghoulish, as different posters try to haggle over the worthiness of these individual human beings, seeking some definitive age of the individual before which the society will count these individual human lives worthy of protection.
Before this gets much further, let it be said that if American society does not get this right, now, at this juncture in our national life, we will be embracing cannibalism soon as if it is enlightened medical application for 'cures' for the older in our society by harvesting the body parts of the younger (stem cells are the body parts of the individual human being at their embryonic age along their individual continuum of life in their body). Does our society value individual human life?
Individual human life begins at conception. There is no point following fecundation where an individual life may be halted that doesn't terminate a human being's existence. Let me reiterate that one. Halting the continuum of individual life begun at conception ends an individual human life already in existence. Will we 'bottom out' at cannibalizing the earliest age of the individual? No, that will still not be the ultimate denegration of humanity, but it will signal our end collectively. The slippery slope has one last abomination : the harvesting of identical twin individuals supported for a few weeks or months until their tissues develop to the stage 'most desired for harvesting to treat the older twin'.
It must stop now, or we will have no recourse to cease the abomination.
I do not disagree; I was merely pointing out possible divisions. My point is that the question must be when does human life begin; fetal conscious – or lack thereof – is not (in my opinion), a argument for or in opposition, to abortion. Originally, this thread dealt with the consciousness of fetuses as an argument against abortion.
My point is that there are better reasons to oppose abortions. Whether or not a fetus feels pain, or thinks, or is self-aware is not the point. The point is, is a fetus a person; I think the answer is yes.
FYI, be careful that you mean what you think you mean when you say "conception". It is not another word for "fertilization". Indeed, the current medical definition of "conception" seems to be "implantation". This conveniently allows IUDs, Morning After pills, and other birth control pills to be considered "contraceptives" and not abortion-causing drugs. You may mean "conception" to mean "implantation" but I'd strongly urge you to switch to "fertilization" if that's what you actually mean.
Biological life begins at conception, but the law exists to protect people and not biology. Likewise, the law exists to punish true violations of what is right and not merely to force some people to live as others recommend.
The pro-life movement can retreat into its nice, neat, black-and-white definitions and refuse to listen to discuss anything that doesn't fit its little world. However, failure to recognize the questions that people have and address the substance of their concerns simply marginalizes us in their eyes. If they believe that we are incapable of answering their ideas with anything other than cookie-cutter rhetoric, they will not bother to consider our point of view any further.
Abortion is currently legal in this country. We aren't in a winning position that we must only defend. We can't go into a "prevent defense" and try to run out the clock. We must aggressively seek to understand what people believe and why they support keeping abortion legal. While a tiny majority may claim to think abortion is wrong in some polls, a simple belief that something is wrong doesn't necessarily translate into support for more laws. There are many things that I think are wrong but that I wouldn't necessarily punish through the criminal justice system. In order to pass effective laws banning most abortions, we must persuade many more people to move from a general belief that abortion is wrong to a willingness to support laws against abortion. I don't think we can accomplish this without discussing these kinds of early life distinctions.
I'm not advocating embrionic stem-cell research. We can still refuse to fund this kind of research because we have moral reservations about it. I can also support laws restricting this research because it violates standards that we have deliberately set to build a fence around the wrongful use of human beings as subjects of medical experiments.