Personally I firmly and vehemently agree with people's right to base their votes on whatever they feel is important, no matter how much I grieve at the outcome of their poorly founded choices. "If life doesn't start at conception, then where does it start?" is a question that perfectly frames the boolean thinking that religion is heir to. Everything must be in absolutes, in yes/no, true/false, good/evil easy-to-understand form. But reality's not like that. Life and death and humanity are not absolutes. Health workers know this as a matter of course: ask anyone who has spent fifteen minutes pumping away at someone's chest in CPR, only to declare the patient dead, whether there was a definitive moment of death. There is not, any more than there is a definitive moment where the machines change from keeping an alive person from dying, to keeping a dead person from rotting. There are just arbitrary guidelines, which change as we get better at restoring people from the grey areas. As there is no definitive end to life, so there is no definitive beginning. We can create people (eg by splitting a blastocyst to create identical twins) without a moment of conception: are these not people? If someone found a way to bring a fertilised egg all the way to birth in an artificial womb, would abortion suddenly become murder? What if someone found a way to make eggs become babies parthenogenetically - would those be non-people? (are asexually created aphids, then, non-aphids?) Are siamese twins two people or one? If two, then is a four-legged man two people, or one? Where is the division between the two states? What is life? Where is the margin? Is a bacterium alive? A virus? What is the minimum physical thing that can be said to be a marker for "life"? If we make a machine that has that property, is it "alive"? The answer to your question is that sperm are alive, and eggs are alive. Life does not start at conception: nothing is "created", only "joined". Life started a lot before that, many millions of years before.