One side believes that life begins either at the moment of conception, or sometime shortly after that, (there are various opinions, but this particular side of the line all agree that life begins while a baby is inside the womb). Those who hold to this, believe that inside a mother is a human being who has full rights as a human. If you killed this human, it should be the exact same thing as if you had walked up to someone and fired a gun on them.

Some people have been convicted of manslaughter for harming a pregnent woman and killing her unborn child, so this viewpoint is not something that is entirely ridiculous. If, for a moment, you could imagine that some people were killing babies who had just been born, you might be able to imagine the same sort of horrified reaction that the people have who believe that unborn children are fully human.

On the other hand, there are those who believe that an unborn child is not quite a human yet, but rather something similar to cellular tissue (there are also varying opinions  on this side of the argument as well). These people see the issue as enforcing laws on a woman that could affect her entire life, just because some other group believes that cellular tissue is human.  If the government created a law that said anyone who has cancer cannot remove it, because the cancer is a living thing,  then that would be the same sort of law to these people.

The line is clearly drawn where people believe that life starts and someone becomes human. Is it at the moment of conception? (which is the view that the Catholic Church holds). If so, this would mean that certain types of birth control are committing murder anytime a woman uses it.  Others hold that a child becomes human after a certain stage of development in the womb, such as when it starts sucking its thumb or moving around. Still other people believe that a baby is not a human until it is born and takes its first breath. Anything before this is non-human, and can be destroyed with no moral bounds being broken.

There is no clear scientific data on this topic. The accounts range wildly. Viewpoints are debated constantly and with much yelling and spitting on both sides. Few topics can bring up so much emotional energy in people. Personally, I have no answers, as I have never studied up on the topic of the unborn. My point in writing about it is to define exactly what the debate is about, which many people seem to miss out on, and that is simply when life begins. The entire debate fascinates me because both sides have such powerful arguments, but all the while the simple point seems to be overlooked.  I am not sure why this is.

If it were the future, and we had the correct technology, I think that people should be sterile unless they go through some kind of process, such as getting a simple injection or taking a pill…almost like reverse birth control. This way, having a child would require a certain amount of thought. Anyone who wanted could still  have children, but no one could accidentally become pregnant; however, this is currently not the case, and figuring out whether abortion is killing a human (and thus committing murder) or rather a case of violating a persons rights  is an important topic of our time.

Maybe a certain amount of cells should be required to be qualified as a human, or perhaps the first heartbeat. If this point could be agreed upon, we might be able to arrive at a happy medium for both sides.