"Many will say fetus is like a chunk of cells or a parasite. Any argument like this is a cop out excuse."

Fetal development begins from the ninth week after fertilisation (or eleventh week gestational age) and continues until birth. So your claim is farcically wrong, it is quite literally a lump of cells, as of course are all living things. Describing abortion as murder is the typical bigoted hyperbole theists use when they refuse to rationally debate the true complexity of the topic. So it's theists using this tired cliched rhetoric that are using a cop out as an excuse.

Murder is a legal term for a start, so the claim tells us nothing about the morality or not of terminating a pregnancy, though it does show an astonishing ignorance on the part of anyone using this argument. It's pure emotional hyperbole, which is what the anti-choicers always use in my experience.

If a father was the only possible donor for a kidney, to an adult child of his that would die without it, and that father for whatever reason refused to donate a kidney, would you want to use the law to use his body against his will? Strap him down and remove one of his kidneys against his wishes? If not then why would you assign rights to an insentient blastocyst you'd deny a fully formed human capable of experiencing physical and emotional pain?

That's what you are insisting women should be forced to do, to have their bodies used against their will. Now a foetus for most of it's development doesn't have the neural connections in it's brain to feel any pain, is insentient, and cannot experience physical or emotional pain, nor can it store and recall memories.

Compare that to an say a teenage child dying of kidney failure.

"Atheists can be very hypocritical when it comes to the topic of abortion because this is the only topic where they seem to ignore science as far as determining what is life. "

This is another tried lie theists trot out in their endless hyperbole about abortion. What has being an atheist to do with abortion anyway? Some atheists are opposed to abortion, and some theists are not, and I have never see an atheist use unscientific claims about a feotus. Explain why the fact it is alive makes it immoral to terminate the pregnancy, and after that moronic claim you'd better be using sound scientific arguments as well.

@Jordan
Ah the base question: what is human life?

Well first, let me quickly point out the flaws of your "two questions process."

The hair at top of our head is alive, our nails are alive, yet almost no one is suggesting LAWS barring people from cutting their hair or clipping their nails. First question is rather silly and redundant.

The 2nd question is it human a full blown human that gets all the rights we typically bestow upon all "humans?" (Like right to life.) You will find if we jumped down that rabbit hole, that there is no clear involtiable line we can draw. It turns out it ends up being opinion. If you want I can jump down that rabbit hole with you, so you can discover that conclusion for yourself, but I want to keep this response shortish.

And therein lies the real problem. Opinion. As much as we would like to, we can't say: "there, at this point that clump of cells with dna from a father and mother is a full blown human with full rights that supersedes even a woman's right to her own body.

Since we are stuck in opinion land, you must recognize that forcing your opinion on what is life, over the woman's own opinion on what is life and how it measures to her own right to her own body. Is wrong.

When we got to competing opinions that cannot be "evidenced" with hard science, we run into a problem, a big problem. Whose opinion do we go by, in this gap that reality, science and evidence cannot cover. (This is a philosophical question, not a biological question.)

... btw the biological, (science,) answer is that human life is a cycle, with key points in that cycle, but as a repeating process it has no beginning or end, just various steps along the way.

In the impossible perfect world I would want every fertilized egg to have it's wonderful potential realized. We do not live in a perfect world. The reality is there is unwanted blastocyst/zygotes/fetuses/babies. And these require a host female body to survive and grow from a mostly inert clump of cells with dna information into a person we can chat with on an internet forum.

Luckily their is a silver lining here. Thanks to advancements in modern medicine, the point that a fetus requires a female host body has been significantly reduced where advanced nicus are accessible. Somewhere around 20-26 weeks a fetus can survive outside the host body with the aid of an advanced, expensive, modern NICU. Just like that the opinion argument of at what point in the reproductive cycle a human is a human, versus the rights of a woman to her own body can be made irrelevant. If someone that has the necessary resources wants to protect what they consider to be human life, they can offer the option to the female to no longer sacrifice their own rights to their own body.

If saving every last fertilized egg because I consider that to be a full blown human life with all the rights to life, I can do that without trampling a woman's right to her own body. However it is incredibly expensive, which is why I suspect all these anti choice folks don't actually try to invest the necessary billions to provide advanced nicu's everywhere, and to further reduce the window where a female host body is required.

If all the anti choicers put their money into it, because this issue is so important to them, I imagine we could greatly speed up the day where abortion would never be necessary, because any woman that did not want to give up their right to their body could simply have medical science take over. Heck the natural reproductive cycle is fraught with problems, medical science could actually make the birthing process much safer to both the mother and the fertilized egg much safer with less likelihood of injury/deformity/death.

Of Course all the anti choicers would likely bankrupt themselves trying to care/feed/support all these unwanted children, but then again they say all "human" (their particular opinion,) life is so important to them this should be a sacrifice they are willing to make. However there is the issue of overpopulation, which I would categorize as "critical." Potentially greatly increasing the rate of human reproduction would only exacerbate this problem.

 
 

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Saying clump of cells at ~13 weeks is a living human is ignoring science.
It is not alive, it doesn't have an advanced mammalian brain until much much later.

BTW, we don't issue a birth certificate until it's born, and breathing. But again note that we defend it against elective abortions at variously around 20 weeks, because that's the youngest preemie which medical science can keep alive on its own (in most of the world, that is true. Admit that.)

@Cog Re: "I am completely convinced that a human fetus is not viable until after its 18th birthday. If you have one and it has not developed the cognitive ability to distinguish right from wrong or use the basics of reason and logic to resolve life's little issues, it should not only be legal but also ethical and moral to abort it."

Bwaaaaaa-haaaa-haaaa!!! Oh, holy hell!!!... I'm just now seeing this post! That is some of the funniest shit I have read in awhile!.... Bwaaaa-haaaa-haaaa! Damn, you're killin' me, dude! Even had my wife laughing! Bwwaaa-haaa-haaa!