This question has created a lot of discussion over many years by pro life and pro abortion camps as to exactly at what stage of the process life can be considered to start.

The stages of pregnancy are often recognised as:- conception, implantation, quickening, tissue separation, brain activity, foetal viability and birth.

I would like to propose that we need to change the debate within this question to decide what is the difference between life and "a" life.

Whilst it is often held, especially amongst the catholic flock, that the first stage, conception, begins life it can be argued that this is not valid as the beginning of "a" life is the stage when the foetus has brain activity and is viable. A life cannot begin to live if it does not become viable....?

It is a well practiced process to turn of sustainable equipment when a person is brain dead, so if we apply this approach to the question of when life begins it would be when the brain is active and the foetus is viable.

Have you ever noticed that the pro-choice supporters have already been born?

I believe life starts when the organism begins growing and attempting to develop. When it's cells begin to divide and multiply.

If you believe that people have souls, a more to the point question is "When does a baby receive a soul?"

Once you get a job your life really starts.

Technically I believe that life begins before conception, With a multitude of possible babies unborn and therefore dead before birthed. A baby or foetus is only of any value because it has the potential to become a person. As nobody can be bothered to have or even imagine those unborn babies they have no assigned value as nobody cares about them. People only begin to care about the child when they observe it's existence or acknowledge its status as a person, which luckily for the child is rather apparent during pregnancy, birth and throughout maturity due to having a physical form and the proceeding interactions and personality developments.

I think that labelling the creature in the womb unborn while the creature outside of it is called alive without considering what the foetus's potential state in the future is a convenient shortcut to either win an argument or a moral bypass or just plain inconsideration.

As for the treatment of these non-sentient lumps of pre-human crap, it really depends on what value is assigned to them. Most couples will intend to have a child and will love it as soon as they are aware of it, which I think is why our society is so held up over abortion, because the lovey-dovey couples that make up 99.9999% of people at some point often cannot comprehend having the child they imagine to have in the womb of a woman to be murdered in an abortion. It is therefore difficult for a regular person raised by regular people to reject a baby conceived not of love, but of pleasure or by accident, probably due but not limited to their incapability of understanding.

In a situation where a child is born where nobody is willing to love and support it in all ways, the child is better off dead. It is already unfair to the child to have them questioning their biological parents than to have them living unsupported as well.

So when do you call a person a person independent of the value of others? This is the question I ask you before someone strikes me down as a psychopathic baby killer as it will make for far better discussion.

Personally I believe this is achieved through a constructed personality that is eventually labelled by others at some point as a person, before they place any value on them. I believe there is no such thing as a complete personality. People change over time whether they want to or not. This process of change can even be greatly sped up with conscious effort although the mantel you form in infancy for your personality is typically always identifiable in some form through any alterations you may inadvertently or deliberately make. While the initial personality can become superficial over time, it is typically important. So I might say the independence of a life will begin around childhood, but will depend on the criteria of the observer.

Without the affection of another before it can be said the child holds an individual or copied personality then effectively they have no value as by definition nobody cares, not even the children themselves outside of their instincts. Only their potential to be human is left at this stage and all previous stages of the child's life, which too requires another's consideration to protect and fulfil.

By here you could even say murdering pre-people is acceptable, or those in comas, or those with specific brain damage is or should be acceptable. Which I believe is true. Why you would want kill such people is beyond me, but technically by this logic you could. We are however not that rational as far as beings go, and blend a whole load of associations into such things.

Anyway, the point I'm horribly attempting to stress is the importance of others in the importance of you as well as the importance of empathy, particularly in our collective society. Empathy rules all in ethical matters, and does not tie well in strong knots with reason as many use for topics such as abortion. The only real question in abortion is whether you consider the life of the unwilling parents or the child-without-willing-parents. Which in my opinion are both equally viable.

Development of human life isn't really cut a dry in the sense that one day it's not alive and the next it's alive. If I had to put a number on it, I'd say 8 weeks in utero, however. The first week after conception, the blastocyst is just a collection of cells traveling from the Fallopian tubes to the endometrial lining of the uterus. To be quite honest, it kind of acts like a parasite once it gets to the right location. It attaches to the wall and burrows into the mother's uterine lining and then steals nutrients and oxygen from her blood and gives her waste products. Until the end of the second week, the blastocyst doesn't even have really any definitive body parts, just cell layers. Between weeks 3 and 8, it's considered an embryo and all of the organs begin to form. By the time the embryo is 8 weeks old, it has a rudimentary form of all organs that it will have at birth and from there it simply continues to grow until it comes to term. So I say 8 weeks because that is the point in which it has all of its organs and can somewhat be identified as a human.

Now technically, yes the cells in early stages are alive and dividing, but I have to assume here you mean when does "human life" begin. In the early stages of life, an embryo exhibits a lot of similar qualities to a tumor in my opinion. It grows independent of it's host (mom), it takes from mom without giving anything good back, and it has a selfish attitude.

Life begins the instant you grab that bottle of lotion. Millions of potential babies being murdered by the inhospitable conditions created by the evil conglomerate, Kleenex.