CONTROVERSY TIME: Abortion

Alright, so obviously, I am writing a blog post when I promised I wouldn't. So the deal is now: no Free Will Part 2 until someone makes a comment that get's discussion going.

There was a poll on FB that went like this:
When does a human's life actually begin? When should someone be considered a human being and enjoy the rights, freedoms and privileges as other humans?
- At the moment of conception
- At the moment the pregnancy is detected
- At the end of the 1st trimester
- Once brain activity has been detected
- At the end of the 2nd trimester
- Once survival outside the womb is viable
- Within one month of expected delivery date
- After the entire body is outside vaginal canal
- After the cord is severed and baby survives
So I was thinking of responding, but I realized my views were much too nuanced.
The question isn't when life begins, but when it is that that life assumes worth. Quite obviously a fetus is alive, as is bacteria. And we don't worry about killing bacteria.
Even with this distinction, I don't think a clear line can be easily drawn. The most I feel I can say with certainty is this:
At the moment of conception, the life has no particular worth;
Near birth, the life does have worth
In between the distinctions are very fuzzy.

Let's throw out one argument off the bat: the argument from potential. Often one will hear the argument "what if the child that's being aborted would've grown up to be Beethoven? Or Einstein?" Well, what if it had grown up to be Hitler or Stalin? Or for all we know it could've ended up being a miscarriage, or a stillbirth, in which case it wouldn't have grown up to be anything at all.
More fundamentally, this argument could easily be used to prove that it's wrong not to have sex when the woman has eggs ready to be fertilized. After all, if the eggs were fertilized, who knows what great things those children could accomplish? Ergo, by the reasoning used earlier, it is a disservice to humanity to not have sex. Reductio ad absurdum.
(If one brings in "God's will", it actually gets even more complicated, since then you have to bring in all the theological issues involving omniscience, omnipotence, and sovereignty.)

Therefore we can only reason in regards to what the embryo/fetus IS, not what it might be. And here is where the worth of it's life get's fuzzy. Because as I said before, we have no problem killing bacteria, which perform many lifelike functions that an embryo does not. And unless we're vegetarian, we're even willing to kill animals that have more sentient behavior than a newborn baby. Obviously the argument hinges on the fact that the embryo is "human", whereas the other things are not. Yet, this is not terribly different from one race of people saying it's OK to kill people of other races, but not members of their own race. Just as the color of one's skin is less important than their qualities of personality, so too whether one belong to the species of Homo Sapien is less important than their human-like qualities in determining whether their life has value (for the benefit of the doubt, I am making the assumption here that the value of life depends on humanness in some form--not necessarily a sound assumption [although I think it's necessary, more on that in another post]). For instance, if by some freak coincidence on genetics, if a chimpanzee was born with the mental abilities of an adult human, we would almost certainly say it deserved human rights, and also that it almost certainly had a soul. But then, how far do we have to go before we say it ceases to have these things? If it has the abilities of a teenager? A child? A toddler? A newborn? In fact, chimps do have abilities beyond those of a young toddler. Why, then, does the toddler have human rights, and a soul, and the chimp does not, even though their abilities are just as "human"? And why should we be concerned with the life of an embryo, but not a bacterium?

(This was written of the cuff, late at night, so I sort of rambled.)