I said "conservative in the truest sense," because conservative beliefs are almost all centric on protecting the rights that best serve your own interests. From that angle, it's odd that the shoe is on the other foot, because undoubtedly the right to have an abortion is something that protects the individual's interests. To me it would make more sense if the lefties were the ones bawling over the rights of unformed "potential sentient beings" and the righties who were saying, "Gov, keep your damn nose out of my daughters affairs."
(keep in mind that I am even more right than Deck Knight on that political map thingie)
Or rather, maybe it is because I'm so right that I'd rather keep my right (or my girlfriend's? sister's? etc) to abortions and have the government keep their nose out of it.
This has always bemused me - how the US 'civil libertarians' all favour individual rights, except in cases like this. It's largely because the US conservative lobby are hard Catholic/Baptist religious and not civil libertarians at all.
In fact, I'd say most of them are not civil libertarians at all until it becomes an issue of money or taxation, in which case they're "DONT TAKE MAH MONEY, I HAVE RIGHTS".
As for the cutoff point between when it becomes murder, I don't know enough about birth and gestation biology etc. to say precisely when it is, but the logical cutoff point is when the foetus becomes capable of self-sustainment, or possibly when fully developed inside the womb but hasn't yet been expelled.
Before self-sustainment, it is not a separate life form and is biologically part of the mother, in which case damage to it would be actual/grievous bodily harm. In addition, while the baby is feeding on nutrients from the mother's body directly (from the bloodstream) it is a parasite in the technical sense and hence there is some logical justification that way.
The fully-developed line is the only place that you can actually draw a nonarbitrary line. Anything prior to that falls to the pile-of-sand argument, at which point the destruction of a single living cell is logically equivalent to murder.
Any "imagine how it must be to be an aborted foetus" arguments are disingenuous - since an unborn child is incapable of awareness, this has about as much logical relevance as "Imagine being a tree, imagine getting cut down! I'd hate it, therefore we shouldn't cut down trees".
It should be noted, as an aside, that social experiments have more or less proved that for most US conservatives (in particular, the Rebulican politicians) the abortion issue is not at all concerned with the rights of the child and entirely concerned with the oppression of women. When one of the laws criminalising abortion in the US was being proposed, another senator proposed an alternative bill that included provisions that said a man who is guilty of getting another women pregnant via rape or adultery more than once would be chemically sterilised, and set up various provisions that stated the child in such a situation would receive funding (from either the father or the state) to pay for it's upbringing, schooling, and college tuition until the age of adulthood. The bill was unanimously rejected by every relevant Republican. What this shows is that while the rhetoric is all about preserving the rights of the unborn child, in reality it's about enforcing what the religious right see as 'moral behaviour' by punishing the woman for getting pregnant (because clearly it means she was sexually promiscuous and that's a Bad Thing because women shouldn't be sexually independent or anything).
