About the unborn

The debate about abortion, or rather the abortion wars raging in the US, are difficult to understand from Europe, and in many ways.
Apart from a couple of Catholic "fortresses" like Ireland and Poland, not only is abortion legal in most of Europe, but it is mostly a non-issue. Now, it has not always been the case. The fight was intense in...the sixties and early seventies! More than thirty years ago... There are of course still people who strongly oppose abortion, but those for whom this is a key issue are a small minority, and located on the far right of the political spectrum. Abortion is simply not anymore an important topic of social and political confrontation. It is legal, and regulated, late abortions being generally banned or strongly restricted, counselling being often compulsory, etc. And in most countries there is State or at least public support to education campaigns on contraceptive use, to avoid abortion being the "contraception of last resort".
The US knows a strange situation indeed, whereby abortion, as made legal by the Supreme Court "Roe vs Wade" decision, is totally unrestricted - but where opposition to abortion is definitely one of the top issues politically, socially, culturally, name it. And it is certainly not a "fringe" position in the political spectrum.

I read many highly interesting posts recently about abortion, and the (im)possibility of a compromise, in many excellent blogs. Too lazy to chase all of them but here is an excellent summary, courtesy Ross Douthat.
In a nutshell: however you turn it, this ends up being metaphysics or theology. It is so difficult to define "scientifically" a human being, that there is not much sense trying to pin down if and when the embryo or the foetus is/becomes human. I personally don't think that the early stages of cell division qualify as a human being as such, but one can argue that all the genetic information is there, thus it is a human being. I could respond using the "hardware" vs. "software" argument: the hardware is here (genetic information), but no software (the mind) - since there is not even a brain yet... But this would not convince the other side. Conversely, believers who hold that God infuses the soul upon conception will find the whole discussion absurd, but they cannot convince the non-believer...

There are many intractable debates, many issues where there is no "self-evident" truth. Abortion is a particular case: there is little doubt that, as Andrew Sullivan puts it, "every abortion is a tragedy" (even though I have my doubts about the very early ones, as I wrote above, but then again). But not all tragedies can be prevented. Not all tragedies are crimes. And there is also very little doubt that regimes of abortion prohibition do not result in less abortions, but in more hazards for women. So a compromise solution like adopted long ago in most of Europe seems obvious, and still...
Not sure when this issue will stop poisoning America's political life.