FOR a woman who does not want to have a child, pregnancy and birth is a severe hardship.
To force anyone to endure an avoidable hardship of that kind is contrary to our general belief in promoting individual freedom and choice. Such a denial of freedom could only be justified if there was a very compelling reason for it.
Opponents of abortion think there is a very compelling reason for denying freedom in these circumstances. They regard abortion as murder. Killing an embryo or fetus, they say, takes an innocent human life.
Defenders of a woman's right to choose sometimes challenge this claim. They deny that the embryo or fetus is a human life. The abortion debate then focuses on the question, "When does a human life begin?"
I think this is the wrong question to ask. In a strictly biological sense, the opponents of abortion are right to say that abortion ends a human life.
When a woman has an abortion, the fetus is alive, and it is undoubtedly human – in the sense that it is a member of the species homo sapiens. It isn't a dog or a chimpanzee.
But mere membership of our species doesn't settle the moral issue of whether it is wrong to end a life. As long as the abortion is carried out at less than 20 weeks of gestation – as almost all abortions are – the brain of the fetus has not developed to the point of making consciousness possible.
In that respect, the fetus is less developed, and less aware of its circumstances, than the animals that we routinely kill and eat for dinner.
That is why the fetus is "innocent". It doesn't have the capacity to do anything wrong – or anything right.
Even when the fetus does develop a capacity to feel pain – probably in the last third of the pregnancy – it still does not have the self-awareness of a chimpanzee, or even a dog.
When this is pointed out, some opponents of abortion respond that the fetus, unlike the dog or chimpanzee, is made in the image of God, or has an immortal soul. They thereby acknowledge religion is the driving force behind their opposition.
But there is no evidence for these religious claims, and in a society in which we keep the state and religion separate, we should not use them as a basis for the criminal law, which applies to people with different religious beliefs, or to those with none at all.
Other opponents say the fetus has the potential to become a person, that is, a thinking, rational being, like ourselves, and the dog or chimpanzee do not have that potential. But why should mere potential give a being a right to life?
The world already has more than six billion people. We are heading for more than nine billion by 2050. The more people there are, the greater the pressure on the Earth's environment and the greater the difficulty in giving them all even a minimally decent life. Do we really want every potential person to become an actual person?
In fact, with modern medical technology, the argument from potential rapidly leads to absurdity.
Scientists have shown, in many different species, including monkeys, that it is possible to clone an animal by taking the nucleus of an ordinary cell, and implanting it in an egg from which the nucleus has been removed.
There is no biological reason to suppose that this would not work for human beings. This means that billions of our cells have the potential to become an actual person.
Yet no one thinks that we have an obligation to "save" all these cells and turn them into people.
Arguably, the fetus first becomes a being of moral significance when it develops the capacity to feel pain, some time after 20 weeks of gestation.
We should be concerned about the capacity of fetuses to suffer pain in late-term abortions. On the rare occasions when such abortions are necessary, they should be performed in a way that minimises the possibility of suffering.
Admittedly, birth is in some ways an arbitrary place to draw the line at which killing the developing human life ceases to be permissible, and instead becomes murder.
A prematurely born infant may be less developed than a late-term fetus. But the criminal law needs clear dividing lines and, in normal circumstances, birth is the best we have.
thank you. That is the only argument pro baby killig anti owl egg touching people have ever had.... I rest my case 
