But the question remains: When does the pregnancy become a human being? Biologically, this happens within 90 minutes of fertilization — when the fetus’s DNA synthesis is complete and growth begins. At this point, the child is clinically alive in his own right. But legally, this life is initially unrecognized, and finally recognized only in an animal sense.The difficulty with this legal approach is that it fails to provide any point at which our unborn biological selves take on humanity. Viability — the law in Pennsylvania — is absurd because it makes humanity a function of medical technology. By this definition, at 26 weeks a fetus in a third-world country is an animal while his western counterpart is a human being.