When does life begin? The question is developed after Roe

The question at the heart of the American abortion debate is the most basic - and the most complicated.

It was the perfect ornament for Christmas, she thought – the doctor's photograph of those little circles, those first dividing cells.

Tina Mody followed every moment when she got pregnant two years ago. F.I.V. meant she knew exactly when the egg met the sperm and when the cells implanted in her uterus. She followed the embryo's morphology, size and shape, delighted when everything seemed perfect. She opened a manger and listened when she would hear the first sound of a heartbeat.

She's my daughter, she thought. She named her Maya.

On her way to her 16 week pregnant appointment, she started bleeding. She lost her beloved Maya in the emergency room. Then she had to undergo a surgical evacuation procedure to remove the placenta before it bled.

"I can't tell you exactly when I identified when I think Maya is a person," said pharmacist Dr. Mody. "Because for me and my wife, we are thinking both of her and of the hopes and dreams that we want in this child."

“For us, she is alive. She was alive,” she said.

The question of life and when it begins seems so much bigger than the fights she hears about now in abortion politics, she said. Dr. Mody and his wife started a foundation, Maya's Wings, to work to eliminate preventable pregnancy loss and improve health outcomes for mothers and babies. She also believes that individuals “have the right to choose, in consultation with their provider”, whether or not to have an abortion.

"It's really a very personal decision on how we perceive life to begin with. And that's really the crux of this debate that we're having," she said. "It's not dark and White."

The American fight against abortion has long revolved around one question, broad and without consensus:

When does life begin?

In the months following the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court, it has become inevitable as activists and politicians seek concrete answers to an eternal question of human existence.

Lawmakers and judges from Arizona to South Carolina have considered exactly what week of development during pregnancy the procedure should be allowed. Some states draw the line at conception, which is six weeks or 15 or around 40. Many others point to viability, when a fetus can survive outside the womb. The implication is that after the specified time, the developing embryo or fetus is a human being with rights worth protecting.

Over the summer, when Indiana lawmakers fought to pass a law banning most abortions at conception, Republicans argued at length that a fertilized egg is a human life, sometimes citing their tenets. Christians - that "human life begins at conception" and "God our maker said you shall not kill." A Democrat pointed to another answer found in Indiana Code Title 35-31.5-2-160: "'To be human' means an individual who is born and who is alive." A disagreement over abortion policy has become a fight over what it means to be human, the tension between conception and birth, the church and the 'State.

Yet the issue goes far beyond the politics, law and science at the heart of human experience...