Matt Stinson thinks Julian Sanchez’s argument by analogy on the term “unborn child” fails. Julian argues:

If you don’t share their view about the moral status of the fetus, that’s like calling a pile of bricks an “unbuilt house” or, for that matter, a blank screen an “unwritten blog post.” Let’s not give them this one.

On the other hand, Matt says:

I’m pro-life, though not stridently so, but would a pile of bricks, without human action, begin to form a house over a period of nine months, unless you smashed those bricks down with a sledgehammer, and would a blog post begin to appear on that blank screen unless you pressed the delete key repeatedly?

Luckily enough, however, Smokey the Bear may still call discarded lit cigarettes “potential forest fires.” Or something. Semantics was never my strong suit…