The abortion rights movement has gone from “pro-choice” to “abortion pride” lately. First it was “I had an abortion” T-shirts; now it’s a list of 5,000 women in Ms. magazine who want the world to know they’ve conceived and destroyed a fetus. So long to “safe, legal and rare.”

Much of the abortion debate centers around irrelevant issues. It doesn’t matter who has and who has not had them. It certainly doesn’t matter whether they’re proud of it. Even privacy is tangential. What matters is (A) to what degree a fetus is a human life at any given point, as privacy does not protect murder and (B) in what situations killing/destroying the fetus could be reasonably deemed self-defense.

For whatever it counts, here are my two cents. An embryo — a fertilized egg — not yet implanted in the uterus is not a human being. 60 to 80 percent of them never implant anyway (they are flushed out via the menstrual cycle) and we don’t see this as a loss of human life. Additionally, birth control pills can sometimes allow sperm to fertilize eggs but not implant, so on a practical level it’s not a very good basis for a popular public policy.

The most logical place to define the start of life is implantation. This allows for all forms of birth control (unless one considers abortion birth control) I’m aware of, it’s a clear-cut definition, and it is at this point that human features begin developing. Yes, women can naturally have miscarriages, but we — and the women — tend to regard that as something worth stopping, both because the woman wants a baby and because the fetus has some human worth.

The standard exceptions to this rule are incest and life/health of the mother, and I support them. I still believe this amounts to the taking of human life, but I also believe killing is justified in self-defense.

Instead of wearing promiscuity on their sleeves, the 5,000 women should be making moral arguments like these in support of their positions. Please convince us — the overall abortion rights/anti-abortion poll results are debatable, but it’s clear that most Americans want more restrictions than there currently are.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.