I'll go one further, and suggest the ACME of civilization and culture will have been achieved when we KNOW when life begins (and ends, for that matter) in an individual human.

Today, we do not know. We guess. And we make the 'protect life' societal decisions based on that guesswork.

I'm neither a scientist, nor a theologian, just a citizen who has to help my society decide who gets to live and who gets to die, from the moment of conception to 90 days after apparent death. In between those two events, the society I live in today generally believes individual humans should be left to their own devices, with occasional help given, or hinderence imposed, by the rest of us, when it seems warranted - whether for the good of the individual, or the good of the group-at-large.

Since we today don't KNOW when life begins, and having seen inter-uterine photos of apparently viable beings at various stages of development, I fall back (temporarily, until we KNOW) to the default position of over-estimating the probable 'life-infusion event', and hold the position that societally-protected life begins moments after 'unprotected' sex.

A man's body is his own to do with what he will, generally. A woman's body is her own to do with what she will, also.

UNTIL a third body exists to take into consideration. Then those two people - who agreed to a union that might produce a third person, forfeit some control of their bodies in the interests of that third person, who's body is his or her own ALSO to do with that he or she will.

My 19.95.