> > Some of you believe life begins at conception, and many of you believe this because of your religion.
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> Many others believe it because it is indisputable. This argument should instead be about when that life becomes important--and any answer to that is inherently religious.
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Gabby has hit on an important feature of the present-day abortion debate: it is now less of a medical issue and more an issue of political philosophy. Since a generally-accepted medical definition of the "point at which life begins" remains elusive, the new question is "at what point shall we as a society acknowledge and protect the rights of one of our members?"

Peter Singer of Princeton has achieved notoriety for advocating not merely abortion rights, but the right to infanticide. He suggests that the law should permit a mother to destroy her offspring up to a period of thirty days after birth. I assume that the justification for Singer's proposal is the consensual nature of the political contract itself: members of a society enter into tacit agreement as to the rights and freedoms they give up in exchange for the benefits of living in that society.

The terms of the agreement are defined by the society itself. Although political philosophers like Locke urged "natural law" as a guiding principle for the rules in a good society, there need be no such guide other than the will of those in power. Especially at the national level, a society may write its own rules -- there is no higher authority on earth to which it is answerable (excluding coalitions of rival nations).

The gist of all this is that even if the question "when does life begin?" were conclusively answered, America need not rewrite its laws to confer protection on a living, unborn human. The decision to protect a life depends more upon how we esteem that life -- and there are many lives for which our esteem is scant enough: the unborn, the elderly, the mentally retarded. Even better than persuading the majority that a fetus is a distinct human life would be to teach them to love the lives they do not love now. That seems like a pipe dream, but the best work of religious people has always come from reforming the conscience rather than the law.

Iss