All the cells in a female's and a male's body are human and (almost all) alive. A female forms all of her eggs during the seventh and eighth month of her conception and they are alive and human from the moment they form. Males generate sperm on a daily basis and they are human and alive even before being ejaculated. Thus, any form of contraception can be said to destroy POTENTIAL human life. Anyone who accepts any form of contraception as a woman's right should have absolutely no problem with the use of RU-486, the 'morning after' pill
You are quite correct when you state in post 6 that the 'moment' of conception, the time from when the sperm first contacts the egg to when the sperm's and egg's chromosomes combine in the nucleus takes from hours to days. For many centuries, many religion's dogmas, including the RCC, stated that the soul didn't enter the fetus until it 'quickened' in the womb, which I believe is about six weeks after conception. Before this time, the embryo is frequently rejected by the womb's nurse cells in an act of natural abortion. In fact, about two-thirds of all human conceptions abort naturally. In (very approximate) numbers, in the U. S., there are 16.5 million conceptions each year of which 11 million abort naturally (miscarriages), 1.5 are aborted clinically, and 4 million result in live births. So, it would seem that nature (or god) is really the biggest abortionist. If the 11 million number seems too large, remember that many (most?) women trying to conceive will have several 'missed' or late periods, which are really pregnancies that fail in the very early stages, before they successfully conceive. Most times, the woman won't even realize that she had a conception that failed.
If those religions whose dogma insists that the soul enters the fetus at the time of conception are correct, than there is an easy test for the existence of the soul. In the case of identical twins, only one of the twins is actually a conceptus (the result of a sperm and egg conjugating), the second twin results from the budding off of a clone from the first twin when that first twin is in a many cell phase. One twin is a clone of his/her brother, and is not 'conceived' and thus has no soul. Thus, in examining the lives of identical twins, it should be found (if the above dogma is correct) that one of the pair leads an exemplary moral life, while the other, soulless twin is morally bereft and leads a life of craven criminality. Or, perhaps this argument just amplifies how arbitrary the standards for a fetus 'becoming human' really are.
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