On March 9, President Obama signed an executive order lifting former President George W. Bush’s ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. There is a great deal to be said about the ethics of this decision.But first, a fable from Viking mythology.As legend would have it, Loki — the Norse trickster god — once made a bet that would allow dwarves to remove his head. When Loki lost, the dwarves came to collect their prize.To shirk the promise, Loki asked the creatures to define where the head begins and where the neck ends.Because the dwarves spent the rest of their immortal lives in argument trying to reach this impossibly high burden of specificity, Loki managed to keep his head in perpetuity.Though creative, this is not valid reasoning. Just because it is hard to agree on a transition between two certain states does not mean we cannot speak with certainty about either state.One cannot point to the exact point on a color spectrum where red becomes orange, but this does not mean we must call all apples orange or all oranges red.Unfortunately, both extremes of the abortion debate are ignorant of this logical fallacy. It is difficult to define when a collection of cells becomes a person, but this difficulty does not mean the right to choose must extend to partial birth or the right to life must begin at conception.Moral pronouncements at either extreme violate our inbred moral intuitions. If it is moral to kill a baby in the process of being born, then it would also be moral to perform infanticide.Certainly, nothing magically changes about a baby when it moves through the birth canal.It is also hard to ethically justify the other extreme position.Between 60 and 80 percent of the fertilized embryos women conceive fail to implant in the walls of the uterus, according to John Opitz, a professor who testified before the President’s Council on Bioethics in January 2003.These embryos simply flush out in menstruation.Even more die before the mothers are even aware they are pregnant.Married couples trying to conceive don’t hold monthly “just in case” funerals. And unless you believe hundreds of thousands of never-implanted embryo souls lumber into limbo every day, nothing objectively magical happens at the moment of conception.And so we are left with a situation not unlike Loki’s wager. Toward the end of pregnancy, the right to life should probably be protected. Toward the beginning of pregnancy, abortion is probably a trivial medical procedure.Candidates for a clear definition include when the fetus is capable of feeling pain, when the heart develops or when the unborn child is viable.One particularly interesting criterion comes from Sigrid Fry-Revere, the founder and president of the Center for Ethical Solutions, a bioethics think tank. People are legally considered dead after brain death, and it makes sense to symmetrically consider the genesis of brain activity the start of life.But even without a clear distinction, we can still be opposed to the most gruesome abortion practices or to support scientific research on a clump of eight cells locked in the freezer.That being said, it is a shame both sides waste time, energy and goodwill seeking political solutions. By working through charity, those opposed to abortions could make adoption a more favorable solution to the problem of unwanted pregnancy. By seeking private funding, scientists could pursue embryonic stem cell research without approaching Congress.But instead, we’re stuck arguing like Loki’s dwarves while real suffering continues.Daniel Morgan is a 21-year-old economics junior from Baton Rouge.—-Contact Daniel Morgan at [email protected]