English for People

When does a foetus get the right to life?

Conception is one stage that is easy to identify © Those in favour of abortion often suggest the debate centres upon when the foetus becomes sufficiently human to have the right to life.
Opponents believe the foetus is never anything other than human from conception, and therefore has a right to life from this time.
It's a key point in the debate, especially for those involved in drafting laws regulating abortion.

Spelling out the problem

Everyone agrees that adult human beings have the right to life. Some people would say that the fertilised cell resulting from conception does not have the right to life. Therefore the right to life is acquired sometime in between those two points, and the big question is 'when?'
It's sometimes put in another way as the question "when does life begin?" referring to the sort of life that we regard as precious.

A strange idea

Unfortunately there's no agreement in medicine, philosophy or theology as to what stage of foetal development should be associated with the right to life.
That isn't surprising, because the idea that there is a precise moment when a foetus gets the right to live, which it didn't have a few moments earlier, feels very strange.
And when you look closely at each of the suggested dates, they do seem either arbitrary or not precise enough to decide whether the unborn should have the right to live.
Nonetheless, as a matter of practicality many abortion laws lay down a stage of pregnancy after which abortion is unlawful (because the foetus has a right to life), and the dates chosen are usually based on viability.

Moral issues

Because of the difficulty of deciding at what stage a foetus becomes a being with the right to life, some people argue that we should always err in favour of an earlier date.
They say that if we don't know whether the foetus has reached a stage where it has the right to life, we should assume that it does have the right to life, as this will do least damage to the foetus.

Relevance

Some people say that if the foetus is not a person, then abortion deserves no condemnation. This oversimplifies the issues. Even if the foetus is not a human being, it is clearly regarded by most people and most societies as something special that should not be casually discarded.

taken from BBC Ethics http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/abortion/