The controversy swirling around abortion is a fine example of the dark side that comes with asking the wrong question. It this case the wrong question is, "When does a new life begin?" which leads to the core pro-life assertion, "Killing fetuses is murder, so it shouldn't be done."
The reason "When does a new life begin?" is the wrong question is that life begins at creation -- a few thousand or a few billion years ago depending on your religious and science inclinations. It doesn't begin at conception because a sperm cell is alive before conception happens, likewise an egg is alive before conception happens, and conception itself is not an instantaneous event, it is a process that takes time. This means conception does not create life, which means that life is a flow and conception is merely part of that flow, not some kind of supernatural instant where new life or a soul flows into something that was previously something other than alive.
And this means the basic question upon which the abortion controversy is formulated is wrong.
What should we be asking instead?
We should recognize that life is a continuous flow, and that when we chop it up by saying, "Something is beginning here." we are being arbitrary on our chop point. So the question we should be asking is...
"What are the ramifications of defining new life as beginning at this point or that point in the flow? Which ways of defining are best for [[insert your philosophic standard here: the person, the community, duty, rights, virtues, God's will, whatever]]?"
My preference is, "Are we defining in ways that are best for the community?"
Since the choice of when a new life begins is arbitrary, I propose setting the life beginning point at much later than is the current common practice in the US. I propose declaring that human life begins at one year out of the womb. Here are some reasons, not in any particular order:
o Mankind is a tool-using species. This is a primary virtue of our species. When we deny ourselves the use of tools, we are denying our humanity, as well as shooting ourselves in the foot when it comes to bettering the general human condition. Abortion is a tool. It can be used for good or bad, but if we categorically deny using it, we can't use it for good, and this is not promoting the community good.
o Every attempt at new life is an experiment. Mother Nature is constantly trying new things in all species in the form of mutation, new environment, and for modern humans, new tools of civilization. And it's important to remember that all new lives are experiments -- some are going to work well, but many are going to fail. In the case of a cod fish or an apple tree, there will be thousands of failures for each success. For us humans there are failures, too, many of them. We should recognize that Mother Nature did not design us with the design specification that every zygote becomes a mature adult, any more than she meant for every egg or every sperm cell to become a mature adult. Each attempt at a child is an experiment and there should be no penalty for cutting bait on an experiment. The advantage of declaring life begins at one year out of the womb is that we have a much clearer picture of which experiments are working well and which should be discontinued.
o The Curse of Unintended Consequences has seriously plagued this controversy. Because of the high emotion content swirling around abortion, abortion-related decisions are affecting many health care technologies that have nothing to do with the question of whether or not a woman should have a right to an abortion on demand. Things such as developing replacement organs, finding new cures for diseases and aging, and understanding better how the human body works are all unfortunately caught up in this emotional swirl. This hysteria surrounding abortion is denying the community the fruits of using many medical tools that have nothing to do with whether a woman carries a child to term. This means the abortion controversy is causing a substantial loss to human progress now, and it will grow to huge in the near future.
o There is a question of degree. One way of putting this degree question is, "Should I, a fully grown adult, be treated the same as an undifferentiated mass of cells (a blastula) in the eyes of the law?" I ask because doing so presents a slippery slope challenge, and the more we get it wrong, the more we are really messing up the laws we live with. A contemporary example of a slippery slope issue springing from this abortion issue: Charging a person with two murders if they kill a pregnant woman.
o Finally: Why is the government involved in this choice at all? As pointed out above, life is a flow, so conception does not create life, and likewise abortion does not end the flow. Life goes on. To illustrate this concept that life goes on even when human cells are killed, I present you with a case of killing human cells, but in a circumstance that causes the community no grief. If you scrape the mucus off the inside of your cheek, you are pulling off living cells, your living human cells!, and they will die! <gasp!> This is a common technique in high school biology for getting live human cells to examine under a microscope. Since life goes on, mucus cells or no, embryo cells or no, I feel this means abortion is not a community choice, it's a personal choice. This should not be a government issue.
(A side note: I feel the reason the government is invited in to this issue is because historically and prehistorically the human community gives lots of commanding advice to young women on the issues of birth and child raising. This long-practiced habit of command-advice-giving is the instinctive root of this whole controversy.)
(A second side note: There is existing precedent for my late-in-development choice. US life insurance contracts often state that a baby cannot be covered until it reaches one month old, and in East Asia babies are given a "one year birthday party" when they get to be three months old.)
In conclusion, the abortion controversy is a textbook example of from-the-heart thinking producing the wrong question. And because the wrong question is being asked, the community is suffering a lot of expense and grief, and an answer the community can agree upon is never being found. In this case, all parties to this controversy should recognize that the question, "When does new life begin?" is the wrong question. I suggest that the right question is, "What are the ramifications of this or that arbitrary choice as to when a new human being has been created?" If we ask that question, we should get an answer we come to more agreement on.