Abortion and Person Printing

In my introduction to ethics class, I posed my students the following thought experiment on abortion:

Suppose that 3d printing technology reaches such a level that we can use a 3d printer to print a whole adult human being, complete with hopes and dreams, cell-by-cell. Suppose further that it takes some time after a human is printed for them to come alive. The cells start working and the neurons start firing only after it has had the chance to sit for half an hour on your printer table. Before this happens, you could choose to destroy the human. Would it be wrong to do so?

My initial personal attitude was that it would not be wrong to destroy the printed person before it comes alive, but that it would be come wrong once the printed person does come alive. Destroying it before it comes alive would be no worse than simply refusing to print a human being in the first place -- and that can't be wrong. We need to find some place at which it becomes seriously wrong, so plausibly, that might be the moment that it turns on. But the more that I think about it, the more it seems strange to draw a difference between the printed person has never been alive and the printed person who has been alive for a very short time.

Suppose that you wait one second after the person has come alive and gained consciousness, and then destroy it. Is that much worse than simply destroying it one second before it does so?

Or, suppose that you wait one minute, or one hour?

The most promising answer to these further questions seems to me to be to say that it is not wrong to kill the printed person before it comes alive, and it gets gradually but steadily worse the longer the printed person stays alive. After one second, it is not very wrong to kill the person. After one hour, it becomes fairly wrong. After one day, it becomes seriously wrong.

Is there a theory of value that could make sense of this? Many standard theories will not draw a distinction between killing a second-old  printed person and killing a day-old printed person. A pure hedonist account won't see find a difference as there is no obvious difference in the amounts of pleasure it will create. An autonomy based account won't find a difference in the capacities of the one-second old and the one-day old.

A desire account, however, might be able to, if it gives additional weight to satisfying extended desires.  If the printed person only desires to live for a second, then frustrating that desire is not too bad. Very short-lived desires may not count for much. If the printed person desires to live for a day, then frustrating that desire is comparatively worse, because the person's desire to continue living is comparatively long-lived.