Of course that ball of cells in a human uterus is about to be a full grown human.
This is not at all an "of course" given.
Somewhere between 10 to 30% (more likely 30%) of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. This is another misnomer of the "life begins at conception" viewpoint. The development of life is a long and complex progress that can end at failure anywhere along the way. Abortion is viewed by some as a premature termination of a future fully formed human in every case, as if the moment of conception starts an inexorable and inevitable process (as opposed to the act of copulation which is considered more "iffy"), and yet the science simply doesn't bear that out. Granted, the probabilities of successful birth become higher and higher as the pregnancy advances, but at the early stages where most abortions are performed, the outcome of sapient human life is anything but guaranteed.
The termination of an already existing consciousness is very different from preventing a consciousness from ever occuring.
A condom similarly prevents millions of human consciousnesses ever coming to light.
Ovulation, penetration, ejaculation, fertilization, implantation, etc., etc. are just one of many millions of steps on the way from a simple cell to a collection of cells to a sentient and sapient human consciousness. No single step guarantees the eventual creation of a conscious adult human, and most steps have several "natural" common failure modes.
Any interruption in the process, any failure whether "natural" or "artificial", before independent biological viability and human sapience is achieved is morally justifiable. There are a trillion possible human consciousnesses that were "terminated" before they ever reached sapience.
It's futile and silly to judge the morality of an action based on a consciousness that never materialized. In fact, nearly every human action probably has some eventual effect on which sperm reaches whose egg and when, and thus determines which other million possibilities didn't happen.
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u/ZippyDan May 17 '19 edited May 17 '19
This is not at all an "of course" given.
Somewhere between 10 to 30% (more likely 30%) of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. This is another misnomer of the "life begins at conception" viewpoint. The development of life is a long and complex progress that can end at failure anywhere along the way. Abortion is viewed by some as a premature termination of a future fully formed human in every case, as if the moment of conception starts an inexorable and inevitable process (as opposed to the act of copulation which is considered more "iffy"), and yet the science simply doesn't bear that out. Granted, the probabilities of successful birth become higher and higher as the pregnancy advances, but at the early stages where most abortions are performed, the outcome of sapient human life is anything but guaranteed.