Steven Andrew Jacobs on biologists' consensus on when life begins.
Steven Andrew Jacobs, Balancing Abortion Rights and Fetal Rights: A Mixed Methods Mediation of the U.S. Abortion Debate, Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Chicago, June 2019, 252-253
Results on viability and birth were interesting. Most of those who wrote about those two points were pro-choice, few neutral and pro-life participants wrote about viability or birth. While 30% of very pro-choice participants wrote that life begins at viability or some point after, it was a much lower rate among participants who identified as pro-choice (16%), neutral (7%), pro-life (4%), and very pro-life (5%). Despite this variability, Figure 5.2 shows that biologists across the ideological spectrum wrote about fertilization when given an opportunity to write about their view of when a biological human’s life begins.