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I think this debate is silly ... abortion has nothing to do with consciousness. It has to do with whether the unborn baby is alive.

And whether it's human.

There are a lot of sophists out there with arguments denying the humanity of the unborn baby. With them I prefer a negative approach, placing the burden of proof on them, where it belongs. If the "tissue" isn't part of the mother (it has different DNA), then what type of being is it? If they answer anything except for human then the next logical question is, what is it?

Establishing that the unborn are both human and alive is trivially easy (for all but the most dense Kool Aid drinking pro-aborts). Proving that those criteria, alone, make one a "person" is less trivial. To complicate the issue even further, one must also prove that even if the unborn are persons, that they also have the right to use a woman's body against her will to stay alive. I believe that all of these issues can be answered but they are not as easy or trivial as proving one criteria or another exists in the unborn. You need to prove it matters and, even then, that the life of the unborn warrants forcing women to remain pregnant who don't want to be. Not as easy as it sound.

If the "tissue" isn't part of the mother (it has different DNA), then what type of being is it? ... I know you are aware of the following, I only note it because of the many readers we have who will not join in the discussion and ask questions.

The 'only tissue, only a clump of cells' argument has so many flaws it is hardly an effort to refute them. From the first cell division following fertilization/conception, the individual human being builds its own capsule and its own body. Tissue from the placental sac and the yolk sac are later incorporated into the sinews and gut of the growing child. The placental sac and the fluid within are all produced by the newly conceived individual, not the woman's body, as proven by extensive embryological studies. It is the amazing God programmed ability of the newly conceived human being that protects it from tissue rejection by the woman's body, acting as a barrier and a type of camouflage that prevents the woman's immune system from attacking and shedding the 'other' life within her body attaching to her uterine tissues. The new conceptus sends out the chemical messengers to bring about the supportive actions from the woman's body. At the very outset, it is the newly conceived individual human being who directs the gestational program as it seeks to survive, existing exactly normal in form and function for its age, as it ages, and for the environment in which its life has begun.