Forced-birth activists – those who call themselves "pro-life", although they often don't support policies that would help the living – tend to claim "life begins at conception".

Life has been going on for billions of years. To an eternal observer, there isn't a clear boundary between organisms. Each cell and reshuffling of material is a continuation. A grown man is separate from another grown man, but in the process where an organism arises from another, there is a continuation of life; a reshuffling, not a creation.

In abortion, the life or death of an organism would be of no consequence if it did not have consciousness to experience it. Yet the forced-birth activists refuse to acknowledge that the capacity for awareness is necessary to speak of personhood, and insist there is some magic at the union of a sperm and an egg of which there is no evidence.