I don't think it's an unreasonable conclusion to say that life begins at conception, at least in the terms we can understand, but the conception of anything (life, an idea, whatever) is not the same as the birth of something. If that were the case, then the potential winning run on first would simply go ahead and be counted as a run on the scoreboard. Until a human is born, it is a potential human, a potential child, baby, person, take yer pick.
The question of, "When does life begin?", can only be answered once the question of, "What is life?" can be answered. And it's a far more complex question than people may think, especially to those who need quick and easy, simple answers. It's far easier to state what life isn't. There are certain types of clays and certain chemical compounds that will form, divide, and reshape themselves under certain conditions. Certain chemical reactions can create real, actual amino acids that make copies of themselves. Does that mean they are alive? This is dancing perilously close to man-made lifeforms, of creation itself. To many people, new man-made life forms mean new energy sources, environmental clean-up mechanisms and life-saving medicines. For others, such a breakthrough would mean understanding how life began on Earth by trying to recreate it. Still for others it will a shattering of long-held beliefs. For at least 30 centuries, thinkers ascribed the beginning of life to an extraterrestrial agency - they talked of the hand of God, the divine afflatus, the vital spark, or of "seeds" of life traveling through the cosmos. We are finally on the cusp of having a real, tangible understanding of what life is and how it can begin. That upsets a lot of people.
In the meantime, certain lifeforms are content to tell other lifeforms what to do, how to think, and how to live their lives.
