| | Have you seen my argument that a mother should be able to remove a developing human from her body? That would be better argued by using the word 'fetus' rather than 'human.'
To me, it is a question of when individual rights attach. The argument that is strongest is that individual rights cannot attach until there is an individual - till birth.
When people argue otherwise they have three problems. First, is the argument that there can be such a thing as a natural right to violate a natural right (that a woman's rights to her body could result in violation of the 'rights' of the unborn') - that would logically invalidate the concept of rights. Period.
Second, is the confusion regarding potential human being versus actual human being. As soon as someone makes the argument of potentiality they are admitting that the zygote or fetus is not an actual human being.
Third, is the issue of where natural rights come from. Those who argue from a religious point of view can claim they are from God and then they can assign them anywhere to anything at anytime - mysticism isn't limited by logic or reason. But if a person wants to use reason and logic to derive natural rights from human nature, they won't be able to do so in a way that establishes those rights attaching at any point prior to birth... or at the earliest, prior to when the fetus could live independent of the mother and then the rights wouldn't fully attach till the separation.
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A most basic definition [of life] may be: "an entity that undergoes reproduction". Reproduction: "a process where an entity is copied resulting in a new entity that is similar yet not necessarily exactly the same as the original". If I sit down and type [reproduce] the same sequence of letters over and over they aren't alive unless there is some causal property in the letters that are causing me to do the typing. What I'm saying is that the reproduction must be self-initiated. And it can be identical. Bacteria don't use sexual reproduction and therefore don't produce 'offspring' that differ slightly.
Dawkins, in Extended Phenotypes, would say you are talking about "Replicators" - which he defined as "anything in the universe of which copies are made." Then he made distinctions between active and passive replicators. Me, I don't think it makes sense to talk about something as a replicator if it has no part in causing the replication.
Dawkins also talked about dead-end replicators and germ-line replicators, and about the properties of a replicator including longevity, fecundity and fidelity.
He finally got to what he called the "optimon" - an active germ-line replicator that induces it's vehicle to replicate itself in way that the new vehicle(s) contains high fidelity germ-line replicators. (Hence, his theory of the Selfish Gene that uses it's container to leverage itself into the next generation.) That replicator-vehicle description is the description of the properties of a class of entities that are THE required properties for evolution to occur (be the evolution cultural or biological or even some entirely different kind of entity).
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But, going back to the definition of life: I'm remembering Rand's definition of life as a process of self-generated, self-sustaining action. Notice that it is a process, not an entity and notice that any given entity may or may not reproduce. Great numbers of living entities will die without reproducing... happens every minute of every day.
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