The landmark Roe v. Wade decision, handed down by the United States Supreme Court in 1973, touched off a divide deep within the American culture that shows little signs of healing. The reason is not necessarily that people have intransigent views when it comes to abortion. Instead, the issue is genuinely hard to grapple with, even from a moral standpoint, as Harvard Law Professor and bioethicist Glenn Cohen explains.
The first question we face when deciding whether abortion is immoral is this: are fetuses persons? That may seem like a straightforward question, but determining personhood requires understanding the distinction between a person, a human being, and being alive.
Certainly not all things that are alive are persons. A dog, for example, is very much alive and very lovable indeed, but not a person. As simple as this distinction seems, it has its detractors. The philosopher Peter Singer, for example, says that distinguishing between what is human life and inhuman life is an example of speciation — an act of discrimination that is ultimately logically untenable (and we should therefore abandon it).
According to Cohen, some scholars say that stem cells and embryos are human beings, but not persons. They are made of human being stuff but they do not have the moral and legal rights — namely, the right of inviolability — that we accord to individual persons.
Those who believe the granting of rights is more a political act than a natural one may look toward what Cohen calls a "capacity 'x'," i.e. some other quality that more accurately defines what a person truly is. Examples of such a capacity 'x' include experiencing a continuity of identity, or possessing self-knowledge. While these qualities form more naturally than the granting of political rights, they open the door to difficult-to-justify actions like infanticide (since the infant brain is insufficiently developed to have the concept of an identity, or to articulate self-knowledge).
If one decides to stick with a definition of "person" that is determined by the existence of moral and legal rights, thinkers such as Judith Jarvis Thomson point out that the rights of a mother countervail — she is a person, too, after all. Thomson's famous thought experiment, "the famous violinist" has become perhaps the most recognizable philosophical defense of abortion.
Glenn Cohen's book is Patients with Passports: Medical Tourism, Law, and Ethics.

These are some of the questions I promise every Christian will be asked at some point.

I compiled some common questions I've gotten over the years and asked my friend Frank Turek on to do what he does best: answer these questions and tell corny dad jokes while he's at it.

Timestamps:
03:49- Believing in God is for dumb people. Evolution answers the question of how we got here. So how do we know that a God even exists?
08:52- I don’t understand how morality proves that a God exists. Even an animal can show ‘kindness’ to another and it doesn’t need to prove that a god exists, so how is this even a good argument?
12:35- Can’t multiple universes explain the fine-tuning argument?
15:33- All religions claim to be true. What makes you think your religion is the true religion and everyone else is wrong and damned to hell? Isn’t that completely judgmental of you to say?
20:29- How could a loving God send people to hell, especially for all eternity? Why not just allow everyone into heaven, or have a temporary punishment for the people that really have done evil?
25:58- How do we know that the Bible is reliable? Do we have any actual evidence for the Old Testament claims like the army being wiped out in the Exodus, and how do we know they recorded the truth and didn’t make it up?
32:11- With the terrible amount of evil in the world, It seems that a good God would do something to intervene. How can God sit and watch and do nothing?
39:44- The Bible doesn’t teach homosexuality is a sin so why do Christians condemn it?
44:07- Why is it that only religious people say abortion is wrong? It seems to me that they only care about the baby when it’s in the womb, and could care less after the baby is born.

Through a seven month investigation, VICE News looks at the anti-abortion rights movement, their playbook, their years long strategy to pull off the overturn of Roe v. Wade, what’s next on their agenda and most importantly how this will affect the millions of people at the center of this issue.