[Morality Games]

I always smirk at how well people understand religion and science, but not language. That biology defines 'life' as a a single cell means very little, as that definition was developed by biologists for the convenience of their discipline (they discuss life in terms of cells) and therefore only functions in the context of biology. The word 'life' has numerous definitions and can have many more, as each letter is just a symbol with no intrinistic meaning -- the meaning must be provided by humans, usually by teaching children from an early age to derive certain varieties of meaning from particular words. Taking the biological definition of 'life' and applying it to abortion debates is a textbook case of logical fallacy.

Anyway, thought and emotion are the conventional qualifiers for the status of sentient being (and only sentient beings can be said to have or even need rights) -- the more the fetus develops, the more its nervous system grows, the more cognitively active it will become, and the less acceptable terminating it is. But at what point has it developed into a being with the right to live? If you made me king of everything, my decree would be three months, with possible exceptions in certain situations (threatens the life of the mother). The majority of abortions after that would be off limits (however, punishments for the unlawful termination of the developing human would not treat the guilty as murderers -- depending on how old the developing human was, the penalty would either by a fine or a stint in prison).