inBOIL

This is what we need, but the problem is that fetal development is a gradual thing. Any line that's drawn will be imprecise and somewhat arbitrary. It might make sense to develop a series of legal definitions of personhood, each more restrictive than the last, to govern what can and can't be done at a certain stage of development. (e.g. a class I fetus can be aborted for any reason, a class III can be aborted only if the mother's health is at risk) Of course, this just makes the line-drawing more complicated, and although it may be more representative of biological reality, I'm not sure it's a better moral solution.

This is part of the problem with defining 'human'. If you rely on CNS development, you invite comparisons between humans and other animals. There's a point at which a human fetus is less developed than an adult cow. If you accept this metric (for example) as a justification for abortion, then you can also apply it to humans that are severely mentally retarded or injured. If an adult human has lower neural functioning than a cow, does he lose the right to life? I think most people would say no. Any rule we create governing abortion has to hold in other situations concerning people with diminished capacities.

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And you believe Bush and the liberals and divorced parents and gays and blacks and the Christian right and fossil fuels and Xbox are all to blame, meanwhile you yourselves create an ad where your kid hits you in the head with a baseball and you don't understand the message that the problem is you.