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It is still determining precisely when that is such a sticking point, however. One of the problems is that there are so many possible candidates. What about when a fetus' face becomes recognizably human, near the end of the first trimester? Or there's when it becomes active enough to be felt as quickening, typically sometime in the fifth month. Maybe when the lungs have reached a stage of development sufficient that the fetus might, with luck and heavy technological assistance, be able to breathe in the outside air?

"The trouble with such developmental milestones," says Sagan:

is not just that they're arbitrary. More troubling is the fact that none of them involves uniquely human characteristics — apart from the superficial matter of facial appearance. ... Reflexes and motion and respiration are not what make us human. Other animals have advantages over us — in speed, strength, endurance, climbing or burrowing skills, camouflage, sight or smell or hearing, mastery of the air or water. Our one great advantage, the secret of our success, is thought — characteristically human thought. We are able to think things through, imagine events yet to occur, figure things out. That's how we invented agriculture and civilization. Thought is our blessing and our curse, and it makes us who we are. ¹⁹

The term "human being," says Gardner, "connotes individuality or personhood. It may also be associated with human thoughts and feelings. With respect to the embryo, then, its use may relate to the development of the brain." ¹¹

Ethicist Hans-Martin Sass has produced a model piece of legislation based upon precisely that foundation. Sass, a Lutheran, proposes providing legal protection to fetuses beginning at about seventy days after conception. Prior to that stage of embryo gestation, he says, "there is nothing that would biologically correlate to what we either in religious terms would call the soul, or in more secular terms, the distinct differences of humans as compared to animals like the capacity of reasoning, consciousness, [and] self-consciousness." ¹⁶

Furthermore, he points out, "at the end of human life, which we define as brain death, we stop protecting what we consider to be a person — a body with a soul, to use more religious terminology." So that if this sort of legislation were adopted:

we would have the same moral standard and the same legal protection at the beginning of life as we have at the end of life, so there would be no double standard. ... And of course the concept of brain death is not controversial anymore. It has been widely accepted since its introduction nearly twenty-five years ago. And the [1981] President's commission has confirmed that the brain-death concept can be supported by all religious traditions in this country. ¹⁶

Still, there is the argument that, while at brain death a person has no reasonable hope of a full life, an embryo before the brain has begun to function at least has the potential for a full human life. Many people feel that the embryo is morally entitled to the chance to develop this potential — a chance it would not, of course, have if aborted.

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