[CorsiHockeyLeague]

I don't really understand the posts that talk about not drawing a line. There is no way to do that. If it's illegal, the line is at conception. If it's permissible until birth, the line is at birth. Obviously, it's currently set between those two points. No matter what you do, though, you're drawing the line somewhere.

The second part is that no matter what you do, you're drawing the line arbitrarily. Yes, drawing it at heartbeat is arbitrary. But so is drawing it at brain activity, or viability outside of the mother's body, unless you have some moral theory that states that those points are the difference between being a person and not. If you do, you run into some awkward issues, like degrees of brain activity and life support, and you still have to have a justification for why those points and not others.

At the end of the day, everyone seems to just pick a line at X weeks, and whatever justification you want to use is aimed at achieving a consensus along the lines of "yeah, that seems more or less reasonable". Which is fine, but no one should delude themselves into thinking that there is some moral magic to that point in a pregnancy where a switch flips. There's no satisfying way to tie the issue off and say, "we've got it, here's the clear answer", we're stuck with that level of uncertainty being something that we can live with.