To be honest, I think this is the main point of cognitive dissonance in this topic.
The understanding of what life is.
Imo, Life does not just start, life is all around us all the time, and has been for many millennia.
Humans are life. Two people making love are life. A bunch of cells dividing inside an uterus is also life. We have billions of live bacteria in our hands that are life, billion of ants in the earth, trillions of algae floating in the sea. Everything life. All the time, all around us.
I feel many people in this topic who are pro-life attribute a certain value to a human life, something countable and different than other life. Something that needs to be protected from being destroyed. Even though, in my point of view, this “human life” does not matter unless we take care of it.
Also there is the recurrent mention to “the human that could have been” of an aborted foetus.
Yeah there is a lot of missed potential, but there is an immense amount of potential also being lost in the life of the mother that can’t abort, in the life of a child growing up without the proper support (monetary, educational, you call it).
Protecting a human-to-be but not protecting the existing humans is, in my opinion, the greatest hypocrisy of pro-life arguments.
Shouldn’t we prevent human lifes from suffering? Shouldn’t that be more important?
Is the foetus suffering if we abort it? Or will it suffer if it lives in a shitty situation? What do you care more about?
Give people support to make the decisions that will make them suffer the least.