[DVaut1]

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In our culture, the way it is set up, there is nothing inbetween being human and being an animal. There is no 3/5th of a human being (we got rid of that).

At some point in process it becomes a life. The second before that moment it isn't a life. I don't know when that occurs, and I doubt anyone does, but that's how I see it happeneing. All at once, not a little bit at a time.

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It's not necessarily the difference between being a human or being an animal.

It's the difference between being a human and being something less than a human. I don't think there's a particularly neat way to describe it -- but I'm a pretty firm believer that a fetus is 1) alive and/or a life but 2) it's not categorically a 'human'. The 'alive' part ought to be relatively simple to accept -- a fetus has cells reproducing; it's growing; is metabolizing, etc. Do fetuses constitute a 'life'? I don't know -- frankly I find such language debates to be largely irrelevant unless we're discussing ethics or legal rights -- so I'm not sure I particularly care if we call it 'human' or 'less than human' or 'baby' or 'a life' or 'fetus' or 'bundle of cells' or whatever such ways we might needlessly dance around the issue.

The 'not human' part of a fetus's character is more difficult to get a handle on; however, if we search our intuitions for how we would punish women who receive abortions -- or what kinds of lengths we would go to prevent abortions from occurring -- it becomes somewhat clearer that calling an abortion 'murder' is a tenuous position at best. But I think it's clearly ending/termination of something alive, or what we might otherwise call a killing. Does the fact that the killing of a fetus isn't murder lead us to say a fetus isn't human? I don't know, but it's not a conservation I'm all that interested in. So I'll concede that a fetus could rightfully be called a 'human', given that the we might come up with various ways of describing what it means to be 'human'. The biological component of 'human-ness' is probably narrow enough, and easily identifiable and quantifiable; but I don't think that settles the question of how we define the quality of 'human-ness' socially.

I understand Sklansky's points on abortion, and largely agree with him -- but I think he confuses 'murder' and 'killing' in such a way that clouds the rather cogent ethical points he's getting at.