A woman must ALWAYS have the agency to choose whether or not to seek an abortion, because it is absolutely their own body that is physically involved. The decision to regulate legal abortions is NOT tantamount to banning legal abortions, and that argument should not come up in any good-faith discussion about abortion.
Life ends all the time, both by our choice and not. "Genetically human" is just a long string of data that by itself means nothing. That genome is contained in its entirety in every living cell in your body. It could be stored in a computer, or written down on paper. If your only metric is "a collection of human cells", then that's not going to be enough to impress me, because that could also apply to removing tumors or amputating limbs. If you say it's different from that because it's a distinct organism, why does that matter?
I can't provide a definition of "a discreet human life" that I think is universal or that everyone agrees to, but I can say that I'm not going to accept that one.
Yes. Exactly that. You cannot selectively apply "Its just a collection of cells" to one kind of human and not another while still claiming the high ground. It's either
that, FOR EVERYONE, and human life doesn't have meaning, or that's NOT the only metric, and we do. And yet, the same logic that applies to our own lives' value applies in every way to an unborn human. Why possible justification could we have to we choose to end a life under these circumstances given that a life is not threatened?
We are either a collection of cells with no meaning, or something more. It has nothing to do with religion, it has nothing to do with our beliefs as far as God or the Human Soul or any of that crap that people have been using as an excuse to avoid the issue since forever. And the modern question of abortion has nothing whatsoever to do with what some psycho holding a bible believed 1000 years ago, or 100 years ago, or 10 years ago. It has to do with the very binary choice of whether our society will define at the most basic level whether we value human life or whether we don't. RIGHT NOW we have the medical science available to handle abortions and births with practically zero risk in practically every single situation. In a case where there is a risk to the life of the mother or infant, there is clear grounds for an abortion.
The question of the intrinsic value of human life is the only metric by which we can proceed to arrive at a reasonable and measured conclusion regarding abortion, and humanity
will not answer it.