If we accept that a human life has value, and, when innocent of heinous capital crimes, cannot with moral authority be ended unless in cases of self-defense or, for those who embrace euthanasia, lack of viability cum a certain expressed quality, then whether life begins at the moment of conception, or implantation, or viability outside the uterus is the first important question to address in developing one's own stance on abortion.

How ought we to define life? One persuasive argument is that we ought to define a human life as beginning when the fetus has the potential to live outside the womb on its own. That is, at the earliest according to current science, at 23 weeks of development (near the end of the second trimester). The reasoning is that at this stage, the fetus is a separate person from the mother, rather than a part of her body.

Although I do not believe it is reasonable to portray an embryo or earlier staged fetus as a life entirely separate from its mother's, neither do I believe it makes sense to assume it is nothing more than undifferentiated maternal tissue.

It seems odd that -- legally -- we conceive of a forming child within a woman as nothing more than generative cells, enabled by a male's fertilizing agent. We admit no sense of the embryo as a symbiotic entity, with its own lifeforce and potential. To remove it, under the law, is no more troubling than scraping away undesirable tissue, no different than ridding a woman's body of an ovarian cyst or endomitrial excess.

That is, unless the embryo is desired. Then, even at the earliest stages of detection, we watch over that physical matter as if it mattered, as if it has a separate nature and constitutes an individual life or soon will, granted sound medical progress and lack of accident. The loss of a forming child at 8, 10, or 12 weeks is still felt as profound. The child is buried. The family grieves. And this for a child who may not well have been viable. Many miscarriages are the result of an embryo that is improperly formed and could not have continued to later pregnancy.

That we popularly find it acceptable to change our conception of the forming child based on whether it is desired or not by the mother seems problematic to me. Either that entity is undifferentiated tissue, or it is an individual life, or -- as in my view -- it is until viability something in between, in which case the forming life still deserves the valuing of its life, although placed, I argue, in balance with the right to life of the mother (not her right to privacy or property). From the moment when development toward the end goal of individuated life is enabled, we ought to have some fixed, definite sense of what it is and what it means to us. Moral definitions cannot be rendered along the lines of personal convenience.

The case has been persuasively made that such definitions, of when life begins and what life means, ought to be left up to the mother to decide, based on her own system of values. Yet, we share as a society carefully detailed definitions of murder, even to different types based on their motivations and circumstances. If we acknowledge that the ending of an embryo's or fetus' development is the ending of a life, then we must accept that it is murder. And, murder, our society has heretofore assumed, must be governed by a uniform code, not individual ethics.

So, the question of whether and when life begins, comes back to us again as the crucial deciding point. Recognizing this, some have argued, again persuasively, that we ought to consider life as developing gradually, and so assign greater rights to the forming child as it becomes more and more human. They accord the most rights, those of personhood, to the child when it is may life outside the womb.

One problem with this argument is that it tends to mark viability at the end of the second trimester, which is up to five weeks after current science marks viability (at the start of 23 weeks; the second trimester ends with the completion of Week 27).

Another problem is that the placement of viability late in pregnancy tends to be based on lung, rather than brain, development. Determining when brain development reaches a "human" level is tricky. At 6 weeks of development, embryos register electrical activity in their forming brains and nervous systems at 6 weeks of development. Within the first trimester, they also respond to pain stimuli. By 20 weeks, fetuses register a suckle response when their lips are brushed. By 23 weeks, when fetuses first become only marginally viable outside the womb, they are able to think and dream. One week later, they respond to sound.

Still yet another problem, and this is most concerning to me, is that we are weighing a life in development's very existence against -- in most cases -- not the life of the mother, but against the sacrifices she would make in order to carry a child to term. I don't undersell those sacrifices by calling them mere inconvenience. Carrying a wanted child to term means medical, emotional, familial, and financial burdens. Carrying an unwanted child to term, and in less than ideal circumstances for the mother, means additional costs to her and those around her. And yet, what is a human life worth, granted of course that we acknowledge a forming child may be considered alive, at least in a partial, conjoined sense?

The most sinister argument, however, is the one we so often hear, that forcing women to give birth to unwanted children means a strain on our social welfare systems and enforced lives of suffering for the children themselves.

Let me first consider the case for abortion as a means of reducing strain on our social welfare system (which sometimes takes the form of: who will provide for these children -- the pro-life lobbyists? the government?).

Granted that most abortions in the U.S. are still optioned by poor or low-income women, and granted that minority women are between two and three times more likely than white women to seek abortions, what indeed are we supporting with such an argument?

Are we making a case for the euthanization of poor people, of people of color? If the State were to demand such a practice, then, yes, we would be. Since economics and social politics have led abortion to seem like best-case solution to a worst-case scenario, we have managed, as a society, to convince women in these communities to carry out family planning for a rich society that will now have to bear this additional burden.

Whether we admit it or not, by endorsing this kind of argument, we have, in cold terms, established that the lives of their children may be sacrificed in order to grant a better living for the rest of us. What were they going to amount to anyway? Better that they should die than become a burden to the rest of us. Where do such arguments end? Will we next begin making such cases of the elderly? Of the disabled?

Now, let me take on the second argument: the enforced suffering of unwanted children. Are they indeed better off dead than in foster care, or orphanages, or in adopted families? I don't believe so. The vast majority of those born impoverished, materially, emotionally, socially, choose life. Many of them strive to better themselves, to heal themselves, to contribute to society. Those who fail to do so -- are their lives worthless, to themselves and those who love them? Are we so certain that they will only lead miserable existences, ones at greater risk for crime and poverty, that we are willing to say their lives would have had no value and so may end them without a spasm of conscience? Those who make such arguments haven't, it seems to me, thought through what they are really arguing. Does one have to come from an emotionally and materially privileged position to think this is a just view? I suspect so.

The fact is, that in the U.S., approximately 40 million forming children have been legally aborted since 1973. The majority of their developments were ended because they meant an unwanted pregnancy to women in their 20s, most of whom were poor, unmarried, and had previously had children or at least one prior abortion. Nearly all of these forming children were aborted during the first trimester. Were they potential human beings or waste tissue? Was the sacrifice their mothers would have had to make to bring them to term worth the social cost of their births and the possible value of their lives?

These, too, are questions that need more careful, honest answers.

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See my earlier post on Basic Abortion Facts for support of the demographic claims I've made in this post. Embryonic and fetal development facts have been drawn from standard medical sites.