According to some religions, life begins at conception. According to others, it begins at birth. According to science, it began 3.8 billion years ago and has been propagated from generation to generation ever since. There’s no simple answer.

The real issue is not about “when life begins” at all. It’s about abortion: when does a person get the right to life?

That depends on a more basic question: where does the right to life come from? Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, wrote that all people are created equal and have a God-given right to life (along with liberty and the pursuit of happiness). But he didn’t get that from scripture. He was just contradicting the view that people were created unequal, with kings having a God-given right to rule over other people. And anyway, if we say the right to life is God-given, we’re back where we started, because different religions give different answers.

Religion gives us too many answers; science doesn’t give us any. Where does that leave us?

It leaves us on our own. We, the people, have to decide who has a right to life, and we have to decide it the usual way decisions are made in a democracy. We make a law, or let our representatives make a law, and then we abide by that law. Once the law has been written, nobody can say that doctors who follow the law are murderers.