I understand that, but a human being is the union of a soul and a body. Not just a body. At what point does “life” gain a soul? Does the sperm have a soul? The egg?
At some point it becomes a human being. It isn’t a human being when it is just an egg or just a sperm. It doesn’t make sense to believe that every fertilized egg is a human soul.
All belief is a matter of opinion. Even science gets draped in opinion. We have to make decisions based on the best available evidence. Viability doesn’t begin at conception, but at implantation. Outside the womb using current technology it begins at about 22 weeks.
If all Americans could agree on those two terms it would end decades worth of vitriolic debate about innocent human life. If we allowed contraception that prevented implantation and limited abortion to viability we’d be much, much closer to the goal than we are now. You can get consensus around my definitions. The life begins at conception argument is nonsense on its face if you’re discussing human life and not simply “life”.
I do not attempt to place when a soul might be present or not, because that is too similar to many of the pro-abortion arguments. I have seen many intellectual abortion advocates argue that because an unborn baby can’t live without its mother’s intervention, it does not deserve to live. Or, that because society has not invested any effort towards socializing/educating unborn babies, they really aren’t human and thus have no right to life. Those arguments and others like them all apply some exterior criterion in order to arbitrarily determine what is a person whose life deserves to be protected. I have a huge problem with that. Once you start picking and choosing what fits the definition of human, then you can justify killing at any stage of life—and, indeed, we have seen that occurring in the current debate about euthanasia.
I don’t see that arguing that a soul is present at one point, but not another, really helps things. There is no objective criterion by which one can determine if there is a soul; therefore, its presence is a matter of opinion. That then leaves the door open to justifying the extinction of human life at any stage—e.g., one could argue that the ability to talk is proof of a soul, and thus justify killing anyone who cannot talk.
That is why I choose to go with life, and not soul, as the defining factor. Life and humanity are both objective measures that can be determined by scientific methods. I also think that the ability to grow and develop as a human is necessary in the determination of whether the life should be protected. I’ve grown countless human cells in culture, which will never develop as human beings—I do not commit murder by killing them.