Re: If you have potential, then you don't have to do anything?

What do you mean "..a pregnancy allowed to proceed to the end results in a live human being?"

Does that pregancy proceed on its own, unless stopped like a snowball rolling down a hill? Or do you have to support that pregancy with nutrition, exercise, sleep, money. Isn't that pregnancy completely dependent on the continuing support of both parents?

For you a pregnancy runs on its own in the begining then becomes a live human being in the end? I guess you mean birth. Is all this done independent of the the mother and the parents? Why do you switch terms from pregnancy to live human being? Is it a live human being in the begining and then it results in a live human being in the end, after 9 months (rather than not live). Is this your definition of when human life begins? Shouldn't it result in something different than it was in the begining?

A plant is alive also and when you cut a plant after 2 months for the flowers, for drying or because you want to plant something else in its place, no one calls that murder. No one really cares when plant life starts. Biology has a very broad definition on when something is defined as alive. Movement is one of the qualifications for being defined as alive. When I use that definition and look at the group of cells of an embryo under a microscope, I can see cellular movement but I don't call that human life. I would say it's alive because I can see it has movement. I don't recognize an abortion of a small embryo a murder because an embryo is not a fetus or a baby. It doesn't look
anything like a baby or a body.

You can't boast about the successes or money you had the potential to earn if someone (or some events) hadn't stopped you in the very beginning. When you retire you can't collect social security on the enourmous amounts of income you know you had the potential to earn if only you had the right opportunities. You can only boast about the things you actually succeeded in, and only collect social security on the money you actually earned.

How is abortion any different?

Why are there special rules made up for a fetus and it's potential? I don't think everything can be decided on the basis of its potential. How can someone be accused of a potential murder? The potential person is still being developed as that is what the pregnancy is for when carried to term. To say something is alive then to exchange that term for human life or human being is changing the meaning of the original term and changing the subject while pretending to be talking about the same term. Words have meaning and you are changing terms in furtherance of some other agenda whose value, for you, superceds that of the value of truth.

(I had some technical difficulty posting and in the process I posted the one above this by Asparagus.)