Draft:Life begins at conception

"Life begins at conception" is a platitude used by abortion opponents to justify their position.

Interpreted literally, it is, of course false. However, when interpreted charitably, it is… also false.

Literal interpretation
Does "life" begin at conception? Obviously not. Sperm are alive, egg cells are alive, and when they merge to produce a zygote, that's alive, too. (Dead sperm couldn't fertilize a dead ovum, after all.) So conception isn't the beginning of life: life existed before conception, and continues after it, and only had one beginning, a long time ago.

"Life" isn't the right word, anyway. Chickens are life, carrots are life, and tapeworms are life, yet no one claims that killing those is murder.

What matters is not the beginning of "life", but the beginning of personhood and rights.

Charitable interpretation
So, interpreted charitably, what people really mean when they say this is "Personhood begins at conception".

But is this true? Every fertilized zygote is a person with a right to life?

Let's review the process in detail, in case you didn't pay attention in biology class:


 * After ovulation, an egg cell survives for 12-24 hours. If a sperm reaches it during this time, it can be fertilized, becoming a zygote.
 * As the zygote is carried by the Fallopian tube into the uterus, it divides, and 3–4 days after fertilization, becomes a ball of cells called a morula.
 * 4–5 days after conception, the morula hollows out into a blastocyst, rapidly dividing into 200-300 cells.
 * 6-10 days after conception, the blastocyst implants in the uterus lining, and the mother is now pregnant.

If abortion opponents are to be believed, then everything from a zygote onwards is a person with a right to life. This would have some unusual ramifications:

Failure to implant
Around one third of blastocysts fail to implant in the uterus, and are washed out during menstruation, and another third fail before the first missed period, increasing in likelihood with the age of the mother.

If these were people with a right to life, this would have strange legal and moral implications. Should we be holding funerals for all of these balls of cells? As they would then be (very) premature births, of people with a right to life, do they need to be found and preserved so that they can be resuscitated in the future when we have more advanced technology? Is it child abandonment otherwise? This puts abortion-haters in the interesting position of having only God and/or nature to blame, not a filthy heathen godless baby-hating doctor.

Identical twins/triplets
Twinning occurs up to 12 days after fertilization. If personhood begins at conception, then twins must each be half a person (or some other fraction, depending on how much of the conception made it into each?) Or maybe one twin is a person and the other isn't?  If killing a conception is murder, then killing one of a set of twins is not murder?

Chimeras
Chimeras form from two conceptions, somewhere between the zygote and early blastocyst stages. If each conception is a person, then chimeras like Lydia Fairchild and Taylor Muhl must be two people in a single body. Is it double homicide to kill a chimera?