>>18 because the child has not started his life yet. and he is INSIDE of his mothers body.
That's a pretty arbitrary place to draw the line, isn't it? If I interfere with condor eggs and prevent them from hatching, it's the same five to ten year Federal felony time as if I'd killed them after they hatched.
I find your arbitrary distinctions unsatisfactory, and vastly more suited to discussions of animals--which are inherently almost valueless, I regard all the non-human animal life that ever existed as not worth one single human life--than of human life, which is infinitely more valuable.
Yes, I think it's tragic when teenage girls play around and get knocked up. I think it's tragic when they die in childbirth. But I can't help recalling that these things happened an awful lot less fifty or a hundred years ago, when both law and custom held that the girl in question had chosen to play the game and was just going to have to deal with the prize she won. Stigma and the natural consequences were far better at preventing teenage pregnancy than giving rubbers to eight-year-olds, ya ever notice?