“Oh, really? So your body has two heartbeats, two sets of brainwaves, two unique DNA patterns, and possibly two genders? I didn’t know all that was possible.”
But that is only fully true after about 26 weeks (synapses form pretty suddenly then, before that there are neurons, but they are not connected).
Our teaching is absolute, from fertilized zygote to natural death. This is a hard teaching. A fertilzied zygote only has about a 50/50 chance of becoming a birthed baby. It also can become a uterine cyst - still complete with its own unique DNA.
It should be of no surprise that secular society disagrees at which point in human development we go from being tissue to a human person, we struggle with that ourselves. We object to human cloning, but should it occur, the result would still be a fellow child of God. Just like IVF, we object to the procedure morally, but we do not declare children who result non human.
So let’s consider what that means. If you clone a human being from a mole (say a skin growth on someone’s ear), and we accept the result as a human person, does that mean we have to object to the removal of moles? I’m using this example because certain kinds of moles have their own DNA and there are a small group of poeple that object to their destruction on theological grounds.
But we don’t have to be that far fetched. Look at the Catholic Encyclopedia entry on Abortion. Find the point where it discusses an answer from the Church in 1902 on the question of ectopic pregnancies. Then go to the USCCB web site and find the current Directives for Health Care Providers (I think it is now the fourth edition). Look at #45 and #48. It seems very clear that we cannot terminate an ectopic pregnancy. Yet, plenty of staunchly ‘pro-life’ Catholics here will howl that is a lie. Such an abortion, they will say, is covered by “double effect”. But that argument, though widely taught, was never universally accepted by theologians and is often not used in Catholic Bioethics discussions today.
The point isn’t who is right or wrong, the point is that even people who think they fully embrace our pro-life teachings have trouble fully accepting them. Look at CHRISTIFIDELES LAICI, #38. Per the Pope and the Second Vatican Council, the inalienable “right to life” is much, much, more than abortion. But, again, many people who describe themselves as “pro life” will howl if you suggest that there is, in fact, a connection between things like abortion, slavery, torture, and the death penalty - even when such a view is spelled out in Church documents.
The best way to deal with the sort of ‘frustration’ described in the OP is to remember that the foundation of our belief is that we treasure each life as a unique creation of God which He can, and doe love infinitely. That is, start by trying to have all the depth of love and feeling for the person frustrating you as the unborn children your heart already bleeds for.
I’ve found that when you explain our belief in this way, you won’t always get agreement, but you will get more understanding. When you ask, would you beat a newborn baby to death? Most people answer no. Would you give it a lethel injection just before it was born simply because you felt like it? Again, the answer is no. When you explain that we treasure every life a great deal (we are supposed to love each other as Christ loves each of us - as the Lord, Christ’s love is infinite), so even though we don’t know when ensoulement occurs (see the Church’s declaration on Procurred Abortion, footnote 19), we are compelled to error on the side of life. We are also called by Christ not to try to judge the worthiness (or unworthiness) of others, so we accept, or at least try to accept, the difficult teaching of two deaths being better than one murder with regards to abortions of medical necessity.
But we also believe we are all sinners and that none of us lives up to the Lord’s gift to us, so we should not feel angry and self rightous, but love and compassion.
Although, if they do use their “5,000 deaths a year before 1973” sign again, I will point out to them that they are lying to our student body.