1. Why Potentiality Matters
2. What is at issue is whether the objective, observer-independent character of the embryo grounds a claim to protection. It is undeniable that the potentiality of the embryo to be an infant, and of an infant to be an adult, matters very much to prospective parents. Stone's account aims to show that to deliberately throw away a glass dish with fertilized eggs in it is a harm comparable to killing an infant, and that independently of whether anyone cares about a given embryo it merits protection because of the sort of entity that it is.
3. Stone implies that appeal to a special developmental obligation is the only plausible way to ground our concern for infants. However, an ‘actualist’ can account for a right of babies not to be painlessly killed by appeal to the properties and capacities that even a young infant already has.