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  • @pi

    So, now my question is, where would you put that line (ie., up to how many days after conception would you allow voluntary abortions)?

    That’s a very important question, and a very good question.  The truth is, nobody knows exactly.

    Scientifically minded people prefer and honest “nobody knows exactly but here are the brackets we can put around the question right now and here are the sorts of research and criteria we can apply to narrow those brackets” to slogans about life begins with a soul that magically pops into a cell or a woman has the right to decide when to kill.

    The me the core of what makes each of us intrinsically human is obvious, our brain function.  We all know this on some level.  Any organ except the brain can fail or be replaced with a machine or can be transplanted and your identity will always remain with your brain.

    You will die when your brain dies, although most people find that so objectionably they invent fantasies about life after death.  But even for the Christian or other theist, the bodily human dies when the brain dies.  No functioning brain, no living person.  Where there is a functioning brain, there is a living person.

    0 brain -> no person

    1 brain -> 1 person

    2 brains -> 2 people

    The hard part will be defining what “functioning” means exactly.  There are already existing very detailed standards for brain death.   You can search on diagnosis of brain death to easily find such standards.

    A major complication is that the adult brain is structured somewhat differently from the fetal brain, so mapping adult brain function onto fetal brain function is not a simple 1 to 1 application of fMRI or EEG signals, but that’s a good start in the scientific process.