While we are all anxiously awaiting D.Sklansky's reply, I thought I'd post a few summary clips from the other intelligent atheist's comments on abortion:

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The first, central, and indispensable issue regarding abortion is whether the fetus is a person. Issues regarding the woman's "choice" or other such euphemisms need not, and cannot, be considered until the fetus' status is resolved. If the fetus is nothing more than a wart, tumor or similar aggregation of cells, there is no moral question involved. Nobody disputes a woman's right to remove the growth under those circumstances, and it would be silly to frame the debate in terms of "choice" if that were all that were involved. However, if the fetus is a person, then the woman's "choice" is restricted in the same way it would be were she considering the killing of any other person: an abortion would be permissible only if her life was endangered.

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You would not notice the difference, today, had you been killed yesterday, last week, a year ago, ten years ago, as newborn, or in the womb. But it would have been you that would have been killed, nonetheless, had the killing occurred at any moment after your identity was genetically determined.

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I am anti-abortion and anti-choice not because I believe in God, but because I don't.

I don't believe that God installs an eternal soul into every person at conception. I don't believe in eternal souls at all. If they did exist, abortion wouldn't matter. The soul could simply reunite with God, or find another body to inhabit. Murder wouldn't matter, either, for the same reason.

But I do believe that my genetic, mathematical identity was set at conception. That is not some fantasy or superstition. To have destroyed that clump of cells would have destroyed me, forever, and my only chance at existence.

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It would equally be a fantasy to believe that I existed before conception. No sperm or egg, has the potential by itself to develop into a human being -- any more than does an acorn or a rock. ... I was never, genetically or mathematically, identical or even similar to anything that existed before my conception.

But after then it was a certainty, absent an accident, that I would develop into what I am. ... a clump of cells with the potential to develop into a self-conscious supercomputer is a different matter altogether. It is not mad to draw the line at the first moment of such potential, and I do not see another other place at which it can be reasonably drawn.

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In fact -- as it is always in the abortion debate -- the true objection to my position has nothing to do with legal theory but rather where I draw the line as to where human life begins. My view that life begins at conception is considered irrational, or, as John Kerry would put it, an "article of faith." Reasonable people know, of course, that life begins at six months, an assumption which is somehow not an article of faith but a scientific fact. After that magic moment virtually everyone is anti-choice -- i.e., anti-legalization – except where the woman's life or health is seriously threatened. And the legal line, like mine, is drawn to perfectly coincide with the perceived moral one.

Which requires me, again, to present some cold, hard facts. Any human life, at any stage after conception, at any stage after birth, can be snuffed out quickly and painlessly. You are delusional if you think that it's substantially more difficult to kill a one week old fetus than a six month old one. You are delusional if you think that the quality of the sentience of a one-week-old embryo, a six-month-old fetus, a sleeping infant, or you when unconscious, are substantially different.

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