Life at conception?

What determines life?

According to abortion ralliest, life forms at conception.

Some believe when the babies heart forms and starts beating.

And good ole Webster's defines it as the such:

1) The condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.

Living things and their activity.

                A particular type or aspect of people's existence.

              Vitality, vigor, or energy.

2) The existence of an individual human being or animal.

 A biography.

Either of the two states of a person's existence separated by death

Any of a number of successive existences in which a soul is held to be reincarnated

A chance to live after narrowly escaping death

3) The period between the birth and death of a living thing, especially a human being.

The period during which something inanimate or abstract continues to exist, function, or be valid.

 A sentence of imprisonment for life.

4) (In art) the depiction of a subject from a real model, rather than from an artist's imagination.

 

My definition of life? 

Those two plus signs. From the very second those popped up, I knew I was now a vessel harboring life inside. Matthew knew it. The doctors knew it. Anyone who saw knew it. 

March 11, also known as the best and worst day in all of existenence, I learned the heartbeat I had fallen in love with, the heartbeat I was so ready for, had stopped beating. I saw with my own two eyes her heart chamber on the screen no longer beating. The flat line. An image forever ingrained in my memory, no amount of drugs, therapy, or time could ever erase. Did this make my baby no longer a life? 

Well march 13, I got this answer without asking. "Regretfully, you won't get a death certificate since she never actually took a breath of life to receive a birth certificate" 

What?! Can you repeat that? Because this life I grew never breathed the air you and I did she's no longer a person? Are you kidding? Tell me this is a cruel joke? Part of this nightmare I can't seem to wake up from.... 

Not a joke. 

Real life. 

Unless of course I'm in some coma and my brain is living out the worst case scenario. But I doubt that. 

And I'm left here, wondering all these questions, to which I emailed our fantastic state of Tennessee about. 

If abortion is illegal in this state because a baby is a life at conception, why aren't they considered a life after the heart stops? 

Granted I feel this isn't something that should be a huge ordeal, but given my daughters entire life was denied to us. As well as professional hospital photos. An obituary. Having a legal paper trail of her existence for her future ancestors, is that so much to ask? That the world knew she was at one time a living, growing, thriving human being? 

How this is considered life... 

And this 

And even this... 

But not this? 

Oh God, I am begging you to grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.