If you say yes, then you’ll be okay if parents drown their children, simply because they want to pursue a child-free lifestyle or because they developed a disability. This is Peter Singer’s position and fortunately, outside of academia, society does not (yet) even tolerate it.

If you say no, then you have to acknowledge that at some point a life emerges between conception and adulthood and it is a legitimate question to determine when this transition takes place. That transition must be objective and not just descriptive. Calling a pre-born human “just a bunch of cells” is useless since all of adults are “just a bunch of cells” and thus under this criteria there is no “right to life” because it’s “okay” to kill “just a bunch of cells”.

Personally, I think that an honest “pro-choice” advocate would use the same criteria for “medical death” as “medical life” so they too would push for late term abortions to be banned. That would be intolerably late for “pro-life” advocates, but it would be at least provide a united front that could limit the horrific negligence of the legal system in the U.S.

People using the “pro-choice” label need to ask the question more often: choice to do what, exactly? When the consequences of the choice are made clear, people ideally should find themselves compelled to weigh the competing moral concerns. This is why, despite the strong feelings and seemingly intractable political positioning, the moral questions is relatively simple: of course you should protect innocent human life as the most important human value, a value that outweighs even the degree of autonomy sacrificed to see the child to term.

The pro-choice side would probably say that the fetus is not actually as worthy of our moral sentiments as pro-life side claims. It is personhood, the pro-choice side says, that defines moral worth. Therefore, since a clump of cells is not a person, it lacks the moral worth necessary to trump the woman’s choice to abort it.

The problem with that argument is that no one has been able to define personhood in a way that covers beings that we know to be worthy of our protection (e.g. a person in a coma, an infant, someone with mental disabilities, etc).

If you don’t use innocent life simpliciter as your criterion for moral worth, you invariably leave something out. Recognition of life as the highest value — and the uncontroversial recognition that the life to be protected starts at conception — logically entails that the point to which we must logically extend our moral sentiments is conception.