When should abortion/pregnancy termination become illegal?

[Person Man]

We need a reasonable definition of personhood that includes more than just human chemistry and perhaps a certain level of human agency (is being a person simply being a biochemical reaction? I hope not. I would find that totally objectifying). I would say the moment where the potential child can feel pain.

[Person Man]

Women's right to choose > baby's right to life

Seeing this explicitly laid out this way is more than a little disturbing even to (normal) people who support legal abortion, you know.

Its equally disturbing to even abortion rights supporters when abortion opponents of abortion refer to the fetus as "it", as in "it should be a crime to murder it".

I think the emotionally healthy language (let alone PC) should be the adjective him or her (after the sexual differentiation) and the noun the potential child should be used up to viability and then it should be "child" or "baby" after that.

Point which PBA is used for unrestricted, no questions asked abortion.  Any point before birth for life at stake and health of mother.  Rape would be PBA cutoff as well.

You mean elective vs. theraputic abortion? The point should be that if a child can be delivered, abortion shouldn't be allowed at all. If its theraputic (pregnancy by illicit sexual contact in which the woman was part of the protected class of the law or if the abortion is to prevent death, disability or to perserve future fertility), it should be to the point of viability. If its for any other (elective) reason, it should be legal up to a minimal reasonable time for the woman to discover the pregnancy and abort.

[Person Man]

As a reference, there are several stages of signicfance between coitus and birth. They are;

1- Fertilization- about a couple of days after you do it (when the sperm cell breaches the membrane of the egg. This is when the independent chemical reactions of the potential human being begins)

2- Implantation- about two weeks after you do it (when the conceptus becomes lodged in the uterus and the woman becomes pregnant) (when the conceptus becomes a zygote)

3- Cleavaging- when the conceptus becomes an embryo and is more or less differentiated. This happens around a month after doing it.

4- "Quickening"- When all of the embryo's basic organs are present, the embryo develops a gender and perhaps when a woman can feel the first fetal movements. This marks the end of the third month, the first trimester and when the embryo becomes a fetus.

5- Viability- When a fetus is generally able to be born and has a reasonable chance of surviving prematurely. Without modern medicine, this is in 7 months, with it, it can be as early as 5 and a half.

6- Birth (Self Explanatory)

To me, #1 doesn't really mean anything as most conceptuses do not implant or develop. Assigning any rights to this stage would make modern human life next to impossible.

For #2, this would be the time when expirementation and cloning with no original intent on the clone growing into a healthy adult should stop. Most embryonic stem cells are derived between point 1 and point 2.

3 would be the ideal time to stop allowing for abortion, but only a few women would know that they would be pregnant by this time. In some countries where abortion is illegal, restoring menstural regularity is a semi-viable alternative to abortion per se....but it may or may not be reliable or equitable in any case.

4- Would seem to be the most reasonable time to stop allowing for elective abortion (abortion where the need can't be defintely established). It would give reasonable time in all but a handful of cases (in some cases, a child could be born without the mother knowing she was pregnant as some cancer patients die before they know they have cancer) for a woman to know of her pregnancy and to save the money needed for the procedure if she has no money or any alternative funding method. Hereafter, abortion should only be performed for theraputic purposes (illegal sexual activity where female was member of protected class or to prevent death or permanent disability or sterility)

5- Would be the most reasonable time to stop even theraputic abortion, unless the abortion is done when the fetus is dying and cannot be saved.

6- Abortion should only be done in the time up to birth when induced abortion would be only an acceleration of a reasonably certain spontaneous abortion when the induced abortion is needed to prevent death or permanent disability or sterility.

[Person Man]

I can't justify having different standards in the cases of rape or incest.  The ethical justification for allowing abortion is that the developing organism inside the mother has not yet become what is considered to be a human life.  There is no ethical reason for disadvantaging the survival of that organism because its biological father was a total creep and loser.   Besides, in any but the most restrictive of abortion regimes, rape victims will have legal access to abortion in time to abort on that basis.  Incest is a more difficult issue to deal with, since the victim may have been prevented from having access to legal abortion services in a timely manner.

That's not the issue about rape. The issue is that restricting about is more about promoting responsibility and chasity than it is about protecting fetal rights or any other humanitarian issue.  I don't say this because I generally support abortion rights and am trying to be cynical about the opposition, but because even when abortion is entirely prohibited (or only permitted in perhaps 1 or 2 out 100 pregnancies), the penalties for providing or having an abortion anyways has ranged from being similiar to a serious misdemeanor (such as DUI, having a dime bag of Pot on your person or Domestic Violence where there are no aggravating circumstances), where one may get a months of probation, a few days in jail and a large ticket to at most a mid-grade felony (such as a very serious Battery where someone almost dies, a Robbery or Burglary) where one generally gets no more than a decade of prison time. You don't just get a few months in the County Detention Center for killing someone on purpose. If abortion was really about hard-core murder, the South Dakota State Legislature would have made the maximium punishment for it as Life or Death instead of Five Years in 2006.

That being said, if you are raped, the law proscribing abortion's objective to perserve chasity and responsibility is greatly lessened if you had no power over whether or not you concieved.

[Person Man]

After the first heartbeat.

That sounds too pre-enlightenment, when we all thought the main organ responsible for our consciousness was our heart. I would say the first regularly recorded brain waves...and I doubt at either rate, that its as immediately after conception as antiabortionists say.

[Person Man]

That being said, if you are raped, the law proscribing abortion's objective to preserve chastity and responsibility is greatly lessened if you had no power over whether or not you conceived.

I reject the idea that abortion should be proscribed in order to preserve chastity and responsibility.  Do we criminalize fornication anymore?  Do we still send debtors to jail for failing to repay their debts?  The only reason I see as being valid for proscribing abortion is that in doing so one is protecting a human life.  When human life begins is a subjective question that is best left to legislatures to determine the answer a society will use. (Which may lead to objective standards for determining if a human life has begun according to that subjective answer.)

So, why are there so few, or any "pro-life" regimes that punish the killing of an unborn person in a different way than killing a born person?