A matter of life and death

I think it is beyond question that at some point, a human embryo must be called alive while still in the womb. Whether that is at the point of conception as science tells us, or at the point of some sort of awareness, there is life there. A beating heart. A developing awareness. It is a prenatal human.
Birth is nothing more than the first of many transformations for this human. There will be puberty and the confusing teens. There will be adulthood and parenthood and menopause and death. All these started with conception.
We humans continue to develop as long as we live but we do more physical developing in our first nine months than in the rest of our lives. This rate of development does not make us less than human. It does not make us parasites. It makes us very young.
We count the days of our lives from the time of our birth, as if we somehow magically popped into being from nothingness, as if we had not been a developing human for nine months.
So, what to do with this knowledge as far as the prenatal human's right to life versus a woman's rights to choose what to do with her body?
If one looks at it coldly and unemotionally, without the influence of religious or secular law, the prenatal is losing the chance of eighty five or so years and the mother is losing nine months. It seems obvious that this young human must be given the chance to live.
And yet I do believe in a woman's right to choose what to do with her own body. I know that educating and empowering women, especially in third world countries where they are stuck in a cycle of breeding, is the most important thing we can do to eliminate poverty worldwide.
Women are not breeding machines. They must have the right to choose to abort a life within themselves.
And so I must sadly and begrudgingly count myself as pro choice.
But please, let's not belittle the lives that are ended by abortion. Let's not call them "parasites" or "not yet human" in an attempt to lessen or dismiss our own guilt or grief. To stop a heart from beating is to end a life and to end whatever that human may have been.
We humans can condition ourselves to believe all sorts of nonsense, like religions and Flat Earth ideas. But when it comes to taking an innocent life, let's not pretend it wasn't alive to feel better about ourselves.
If we have any interest in seeking truth in our lives, we must not lie to ourselves about death... because death makes life precious and only life makes death possible.