Abortion debate: when does an embryo become a person with rights?

This question "When does an embryo become a person with rights?" is, to me, the essential issue.

In last Thursday's debate, Mike Huckabee declared unequivocally that life begins at conception and a baby with rights exists from that moment.   Thus, an abortion, no matter how early, is equivalent to murder.

Marco Rubio went out of his way to make sure he is on record as opposing the exceptions many pro-lifers make in pregnancies resulting from rape or incest or to save the life of the mother.   When asked specifically if he would let a woman die rather than allow her to have an abortion, he said yes.

Look, nobody is advocating murdering babies.   We differ on when we think an embryo becomes a person, and when it has human rights that supersede the mother's rights.

I can agree that, when a sperm enters an ovum, a zygote is formed with DNA from two separate individuals.   If the process of development takes off -- and if it then implants in the endometrium of a uterus -- some process that we might call life has begun.    But what about all those other zygotes that don't implant, or that fail to develop properly into a more complex embryo, and that then flow out of the woman's body at the next menstrual period?  Were they persons too?

It requires months of nurturing and in utero development to become what I would call a baby.  When does it become a person?   I do not see "personhood" as the result of a divine spark that transforms a two-cell zygote into a person that didn't exist a moment before.

Civilized society gives people some choices in what they do with their bodies.   To consider an embryo's rights as supreme, and the mother whose body may have been violated to create that embryo as only a vessel with no rights, seems . . . well, not right.

The decision to abort an embryo or an early fetus is, for me, a difficult moral and medical decision.   It may include parents who want a child, but this conception is so flawed that no viable baby can occur.  It may include cases in which the mother's health will not survive carrying a pregnancy to term.    Yes, it may involve a failed contraceptive effort, or careless disregard for consequences, or ignorance.

The circumstances of the mother and the effect on her life may be such that it becomes a factor in the decision, although I would also oppose the cavalier attitude of some that considers abortion as simply a back-up plan.

In short, I agree with Bill Clinton's famous answer:   Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.   That means realistic sex education and availability of contraception are the first steps to reducing abortions;  and, yes, it means that government should put money into those efforts for the good of society as a whole.    Often those who oppose abortion also oppose those efforts, except for abstinence-only indoctrination of the young.   Studies prove those programs to be either ineffective or to result in higher rates of teen pregnancy).

Still, looked at narrowly from their focus on rights of the fetus, Rubio and Huckabee are truer and more consistent in their principled beliefs than those pro-lifers who allow exceptions.   If you really believe that, from the moment of conception, this is a human being, a child of God, then it should have the same rights as all human beings.   And our laws should apply equally for its protection.

I agree that the embryo is not responsible for how it came to be;   why should it be any less protected than one that came to be some other way?    If you're going to hold that embryo's existence as sacred, as they all claim to do, why discriminate against any of them?  But what about the sacredness of the life of the mother?

Once again, to clarify, this is not my position.   I do not consider that a few weeks old collection of cells actually, at that moment, consists of an autonomous human being.   It is a part of the mother's body and, as such, she should have some say in what happens to it.   At what point in its development does that change?   That is the tough question.  In my view, it must be decided in each case based on all the factors at the moment.

Ralph