When do you think a newly conceived zygote becomes a person?

There is a ballot initiative being voted on in Mississippi today to define “personhood” as beginning at the moment of conception. That would mean that the moment an egg and sperm cell unite, the zygote would be legally defined as a person. The law is intended mainly to provoke a legal challenge which the Christian right hopes will result in the right-wing dominated Supreme Court reversing Roe v. Wade, thus ending all legal access to abortion in America.

Christians are divided on the question. If personhood begins at conception, the morning after pill and other popular forms of birth control become murder. Women who have an ectopic pregnancy or other problem pregnancies that they cannot survive will just have to die along with the fetus growing in their womb, because an abortion to save the mother’s life would be murder, and the doctor performing it would be a murderer subject to life in prison or even the death penalty. Rape or forced incest would be no excuse for abortion. Women would have to carry ANY fetus to term or face murder charges. Better two or more die (one or more zygotes, doctor and mother) than anyone be saved. Miscarriages could be investigated by district attorneys as potential murder cases.

What do you think? Does personhood and the full protection of the law begin at conception? If not, when do you think it should begin?