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byrnema comments on Blues, Greens and abortion - Less Wrong Discussion
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Good fleshing out of an important point..
To bring it back to the context of the abortion debate, it at first surprised me that the pro-life is also often packaged with anti-contraception. I imagine many pro-life people would not identify as being anti-contraception, but my impression is that the pro-life groups that are most vocal and most likely to affect cultural norms and policies are also anti-contraception.
For example, this 100% pro-life person claims that contraception is 100% bad:
http://stobie.home.sprynet.com/religion/100prolife.htm#contra
* (then edited to be less judgmental).
People who believe that souls attach to bodies at the moment of conception puzzle me. I'm not sure how, if at all, they deal with the existence of identical twins (who were conceived just the once and then split up later) or chimeras (who were once fraternal twins and then fused together). I doubt they'd say that identical twins have half a soul each or need to share, or that chimeras have two souls.
When it comes to issues of personhood, consciousness, personal identity, etc., there is no view (let alone value system) that wouldn't be vulnerable to such problematic questions. In fact, I'd say that by the usual standards of philosophical cross-examinations, these questions are relatively easy to address from the standpoint of the ensoulment-at-conception theory.
Most people don't care about internal consistency between their opinions. In fact, in my experience, very few people actually take seriously the explicit meanings of their claims about morality, ethics, values, laws, etc.
They care about winning debates, signalling affiliation, that kind of thing. There's no point in taking their claims seriously and formally disproving them, because they don't take their claims seriously themselves - certainly not to the standards expected by this community.