Atheists, the death penalty and abortion...

[Esquilax]

That's not always true. I know people who have mourned the loss of the body as their offspring had not developed a brain.

I did think about this too. In this case, they would indeed be mourning the potential person that fetus would have become, having mentally prepared and imagined the arrival of such a being. We humans are emotional creatures, after all.

If you could hold a live, undeveloped fetus in your hands, could you crush it if you knew what it was?

My gut instinct says no, but then I would never purposefully extinguish any life without a reason to do so, least of all to prove a point. And I can't really pin down how much of that reaction is down to squeamishness anyway. But then, this isn't a question of what I would do, now is it?

You're muddling "potential human" with "potential person" again. A zygote/fetus is an individual human, a sperm/egg is a "potential" human.

Sure, that's the way you've chosen to define it, and that's fine. I guess the question should really be whether that zygote is alive enough to have an abortion be considered killing it.

Here again, you describe life as "potential life". What we are talking about is already "life". You meant the potential for personhood, correct?

Yeah, pretty much. I just don't see a zygote as having sufficient life to justify robbing an actually living person of their rights for.