Atheists, the death penalty and abortion...

[catfish]

Doesn't this mean you respect consciousness and not life itself?

I respect life plenty, but I'm also aware of the fact that there are certain forms of life that we find acceptable to take. Nobody bats an eye if I eat a steak or crush a bug, after all. Given this, the important distinction is what makes human life more important to us. And that is, as you say, the consciousness; when a person dies, we mourn the loss of that person's mind, not their body.

That's not always true. I know people who have mourned the loss of the body as their offspring had not developed a brain.
If you could hold a live, undeveloped fetus in your hands, could you crush it if you knew what it was?

And not putting significance in a zygote is like saying an apple is more important than the seed the started the tree. You can't ever have a "person" without first having a zygote, this goes for everyone.

Very true. But that raises its own questions: for one, where do we draw the line on this scale of what's a potential human versus what's just cellular tissue? You've clearly put it at the zygote stage, but someone else might disagree and say that sperm count there too, and they'd have just as much of a case to make, really. Not to mention, the human body discards the ingredients to make these zygotes like crazy; think of how many sperm and eggs the average person burns through without conception. Our own biology seems like it disagrees with you, in a sense.

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

But there's also this question of to what extent we allow the potential for life to override the rights of a currently living person. Especially given that, in the cases where this is likely to even be a question, that potential life would be born into a setting where its parents are either unwilling or unable to properly provide for it. You start hitting a lot of crazy grey areas once you start allowing conceptual life to dictate real world issues. My question to you is, where do you draw these lines, and why?

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

There is no line for me, I respect all individual human life.