What do you think about value ascribed to "innocent lives", specifically young children, babies and the unborn?

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It occurred to me recently that aside from all obvious things trotted out when abortion rights are debated there seemed to be a cultural value judgement under the surface of the matter. The idea that an innocent life is lost in an abortion. Certainly the idea that innocent life is a greater loss than guilty life isn’t remarkable, but this isn’t that at all. With the issue of abortion this is an issue of which life will be protected, that of a mother that wishes to retain autonomy over her body and her future or that of a potential life which depends on the body of it’s mother. Here unborn innocence is often asserted as the more worthy priority, not by virtue of having lived better than the other life in question, but by not having lived at all. Or maybe those people just think taking away someone’s control of their body and their future is a small price to pay to preserve any life, but that in and of itself is still and admission of valuing life in the technical sense of a collection collection of cells, membranes and organs over a life as defined by it’s experiences, ambitions and accomplishments.

It seems to me that by putting this brand of innocence on a pedestal you establish a culture that implicitly tells us that living is just one long journey of corruption and that none of us will ever be as virtuous as when our list of experiences and accomplishments was zero.

I don’t bring this up to debate abortion, but because this is the instance I recognized the issue in. My interest is in the cultural idea, no matter how unconscious it maybe, that a life depreciates from the moment it starts and what consequences the idea has on a cultural and personal level.