So? I never said the Texas ban was anything other than what it was. When I referenced drawing the line at meiosis, I was indicating the line is arbitrary, and there's lack of consensus across the religion/science divide. I never said that was the line the Texas law was drawing. Whether you misinterpreted that wilfully or because you failed to understand is beside the point. In either case, you're distracted by rage, performative or otherwise, because the facts of what I said aren't something you can argue with.

It's not difficult at all. I've spent a considerable part of my research career working on embryonic mice. Embryos and fetuses are not individual lives. There's nothing individual about them till they're delivered. No definition of individual fits. Potential for life is not life.

I used meiosis as the extreme to which you can take where life begins. I used that as the outer boundary of where some people see life beginning at. Whether you hold to that, or the first detection of a heartbeat, or 15 weeks, there's good scientific evidence to rebut your claim. There's no individual if the division from the mother ends life. At that point, what we have is a division, a part, of the mother. And she is the sole determiner of what happens to that part of her body.

You seem to be under the misapprehension that it's somehow easier to rebut meiosis as the start of life than the other cutoffs used here. It is not. Life doesn't start till the fetus is developed enough to survive on its own.

Post viability, I can certainly see an argument to define the start of life. But when it comes to that life or the life of the mother, this is again not a place where government has any business deciding which life to pick. The risk analysis is entirely up to the woman. No one has the right to force her to give up <I>her</I> life for the life she carries. No more than anyone can mandate that someone donate their organs.