"Life," and other such loaded words

Does life begin at conception?

It's a ridiculous question.  It is impossible to deny that a newly-fertilized zygote is alive, simply because it is not the clear alternative.  Cellular metabolism occurs from the beginning, and replication, the classic hallmark of life, soon follows.  Similarly, one must acknowledge that an unfertilized egg is also alive.  In fact, each one of a human female's 1 to 2-odd million ova has existed in a state of "suspended animation," somewhere between Meiosis I and II, since sometime early on in her own development.  Furthermore, since every living cell is the product of a mitotic division which produces two (usually) identical daughter cells, every ovum, sperm, or neuron, for that matter, is a sister of the very first primordial cell, traceable back through an unbroken and living line, bringing the "lifetime" of that single ovum to approximately 4 billion years.  Yes, a zygote is alive.

But this is not the true debate.  A bacterium is also undeniably alive, as is a cancerous tissue (as well as the chicken to be slaughtered and served for the church potluck), yet this biological definition of life is irrelevant.  The true question under consideration is whether "human-ness" begins with the fusion of a sperm and an ovum.  This is the question currently (and perpetually) at the heart of the debate on abortion, emergency contraception, and stem cell research.  An extreme version of this debate recently waged in Colorado, where lawmakers tried to pass a piece of legislation known as the "Fetal Personhood Amendment" (Amendment 62), a measure which would confer full legal standing on a human zygote, with understandably wide-reaching implications.  Yet this bill failed, perhaps because many of us, no matter how conscientious, no matter how religious, have an inherent difficulty equating a fetus with a person endowed with all the honors of human-ness.


To many, this human-ness is nothing other than a soul, a mystical essence of being which forms (or is in some way imparted by God Himself) precisely at the moment of fertilization, and persists in the individual until a car wreck or cancer forces it out of the lungs and up into Heaven.  Fortunately, most souls do not have to wait too long to make this escape - of all fertilized embryos, 50% do not implant in the uterus, and another 30% or so abort spontaneously because of congenital defects.  Most of these miscarriages occur even before the mother knows she is pregnant.  Thus, for every one child born, there are four zygotic or embryonic souls in Heaven.

http://docinthemachine.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2006/11/embryo-brochure.jpg

This is an 8-celled human embryo.  In which cell does the soul live?

Human-ness necessitates a capacity for feeling, for thought, and most importantly, for self-awareness - all functions which require a developed central nervous system (and more than 8 cells).  This is a quality that arises gradually, through the development of sensation and cognition and the acquisition of personal experience.  One might recall Aristotle's three-fold soul (vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual), whose layers each give rise to the next, and of which only the intellectual confers humanity.

I don't eat meat, but for those who do (and those who care to validate this practice), a plausible justification for the killing of beings fully capable of sensing pain is that animals - with some notable exceptions - do not possess the self-awareness necessary to fear death.  But then how much more so is this true for the fetus?