"Then, of course, there's the issue of when life begins."

This is a critically inaccurate framing. Life began billions of years ago in the primordial oceans. Life does not arise from dead material (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation).

The issue is at what point the protection of human life begins. Most reasonable people would agree that a fetus with gills and a tail and no nervous system isn't quite there. Nobody agrees with killing babies after birth. Cotton Mather railed so passionately against woman taking their infants to bed with them that there is little doubt this was a post-parturition abortion. Infanticide in modern vernacular,

"Beginning of life" is a forced-birth framing.