You speak of potential. We shouldn't allow abortion because the fetus has potential. Rule made a good point though; every time a man and woman meet on the street, there's a potential fetus in the making. What's the difference between a potential fetus and an actual fetus, if the actual fetus is not sentient and cannot feel pain et cetera? There's just as much potential in each of them. By your argument, it's wrong for a woman to live her life without giving birth to a baby.
I meant to address this point and forgot.
Potential of two heterosexual people randomly meeting on the street and hooking up: probably pretty slim.
Potential for any given sperm in your nads spontaneously becoming a fetus/baby without the hookup: 0.
Potential for any given ovum in a girl's ovaries spontaneously becoming a fetus/baby without the hookup: 0.
Potential for any given embryo to develop into a birthed baby:
66-75%.
In an effective comparison, we have to evaluate the likelihood of an outcome as well as the value of the outcome. The fact that we're carrying around babymaking juice doesn't mean that Newby's destroying "potential" every time he pops in porn. Since there's zero chance of him inseminating anything, nothing is lost.
if you kill babies you kill baby jesus!
You realize that a baby isn't called a "baby" until it's born, right? Before that, it's a foetus. Using the word "baby" only confuses the issue.
CrAz3D is a retard, but I think that what iago says here is the crux of the issue.
[is] whatever-you-call-it of greater value than whatever's prompting the abortion?
Yes, that's the question. It just happens that all of the value given to the whatever-you-call-it is derived from selfish religious motivations and their rationalisations.
Your statement here is ad hominem.
Your statement here is hypocritical.
No. I was clearly not engaging CrAz3D's arguments. I was simply calling him stupid, as an aside. There's a difference. (I didn't reply to a factual claim).
Hm? What you call ad hominem you describe as a red herring. That's like saying "I love bananas. I love how they're so purple, blue, spherical, and granular." Also, it's simply not ad hominem. He never said "all of the value YOU give to the whatever-you-call it", he generalized it to pro-abortion people. Ad hominem means that you're attacking the person you're debating against, not some random demographic. You may say, "by attacking the demographic, you attack me individually," but this is incorrect, since an attack against the individual is irrelevant to the argument, whereas an attack on the demographic, on the stance itself, can be relevant. And furthermore, the claim "religion is selfish" has been made in some serious texts, such as Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality. So if that were ad hominem, so would be such texts.
I think you misunderstand the difference between an ad hominem attack and a red herring fallacy.
A
red herring is somewhat like a sleight of hand. It diverts the argument away from the original argument. Here, Rule's faulty analogy did not address the original argument.
An
ad hominem attack is when you attack a characteristic or belief instead of an argument's factual claim. Rule made the claim that I believe what I believe because of "selfish religious motivations and their rationalizations." He did not address the question I provided, which was the value of the unborn vs. the value of the desired abortion.
Finally:
I think that, when there isn't a clear majority agreement, it's best to err on the side of caution.
This is a vacuous statement, since how one could/should "err on the side of caution" is undefined, it's the debate itself actually. It's like saying, in response to the question of who will win the presidential election, "I think the person who wins, will win."
No; I made a valuation of the unborn child/fetus/whatever being greater in most circumstances than the reasons for wanting an abortion. Consequently, erring on the side of caution would be consistent with the greatest likelihood/greatest value, which IMO, is non-abortion.