[plusone]

I believe that life begins with conception, howelse could a zygote grow and develop? But for me, the most important question is when does humanity start? In other words, when are you a separate person, when do you receive your soul? Is it at conception? Or is it bestowed by God later in the pregnancy? My opinion is that it occurs at the time of quickening, which I believe is at about 8 to 10 weeks of gestation. This is my belief, and there is no way for me to prove it. Thanks.

[Question_Assumptions]

Quickening is when the baby movies and the mother feels it. It isn't a scientific cut-off point and was used by the same people who thought the brain was used for cooling the blood and that bleeding could cure diseases. They also believed in "spontaneous generation" (e.g., that maggots spontaneously grew out of meat and worms spontaneously grew out of the mud) and, earlier, that the man planted his "seed" in a woman who served the purposes of a "field", contributing no material of her own. They also never quite got basic modern ideas such as hygene and infection because their knowledge of basic biology was so primative. It is not any more surprising that such people would think a baby was not alive until it moved than it is that they thought the world was flat. And it also isn't surprising that once they observer fertilization under a microscope and realized the full extent of life in the womb that abortion laws changed to reflect this new knowledge. "Quick" means nothing more than "alive" (e.g., "the quick and the dead") and "quickening" means "coming alive". To use an ancient misunderstanding as a modern criteria for personhood, without some other good reason, is up there with treating fevers with leeches.

Oh, by the way, they also used to think that male babies "quickened" at a different time than female babies (I beleive the times were 40 and 80 days).