"The church respects life at conception and in the womb. The church respects the process of death. But in between...."

I think that the problem with the "in between" is that it is there that the Church must acknowledge us at our greatest phase of diversity. Fetus, dead—we are more alike than different then. But in between, we have vast differences, as life flowers into a multitude of forms, orientations, and values regarding authority, self-identity, need for structure vs. need for philosophical liberty, and so on. The Church tries to pound everyone into a simple form, but it works very poorly for the in-between.