When does human life begin?

When a sperm is separate from the egg we can know for certain that life has not begun, but once the sperm enters the egg and the genetic material combines, who is in a position to say that a human life has not begun?  For me that means that early abortion is not the right thing.  Human life is precious from its outset.  Late abortions are simply killing an unborn baby.  How have we become so hardened as to do this or allow it without protest? The Christian church should be speaking out against this horror of wholesale killing of the next generation. But then the Christian church is not what it was.  It pussy foots around all difficult areas in order not to upset people.  I abhor myself for doing so little against this mass murder. It seems to me that abortion is always encouraged without a proper look at an alternative.  I understand there are many childless couples who would love to adopt, but there is a shortage of babies. The mother deciding to give birth to the child might find that after all her beautiful baby can be incorporated into her life and she can manage financially better than she realized and breathe a sigh of relief that she did not go through with abortion. But the powers that be seem intent on reducing the population and give no proper counselling to the mother. And in one part of the maternity wing parents of low fertility are given expensive treatment in the hope of having a baby and at the other end of the wing babies are aborted, most of them healthy individuals who could have expected a long life, but no, medical practitioners whose first promise is to “do no harm,” go through sometimes horrific procedures to rid a woman of “an unnecessary encumbrance.” And so another human life is tossed into a bucket, a life given by God.  But God is not mocked and mankind will reap what it sows.  Those precious lives will have to be accounted for one day.  It seems to me that Hitler might just have well have won the war because we are treating human life as he did, expendable if not reaching his standards.  So why did we bother to fight him if this is how we behave?