After birth abortion?

[Angrboda]

No, I explicitly said "potential human being just like a born child is."  I qualified the sense in which I used the word human, and did not make a straw man argument.  You on the other hand engaged in the fallacy of contextotomy, less formally known as quote mining, and stripped the word human of the context I explicitly provided.  But even if I hadn't, the point of my argument was clear in that in ignoring the very real differences between the fetus and the newborn, pro-lifers are engaged in a fallacious and bankrupt argument.  But by all means, continue trying to dick your way around the argument with irrelevant deflections and making dishonest misrepresentations of what I actually said if it makes you happy.  The rest of us will simply look on and shake our heads at your pathetic display.  And I will point out that you are simply doubling down and repeating the argument without bothering to either answer the objection, or even acknowledge it.  If you're simply going to repeat empty slogans instead of actually answering my argument, then I don't see any point in your replying at all.

Im still confused on your "potential" hangup, since my point was that it was never an argument that I used, nor one that most pro lifers use as far as I've seen, yet was being projected on to me. I'm pretty sure most of us will say an unborn baby has a right to live because he/she is human, not "potentially human". But whatever, if you want me to retract the strawman comment, so be it. Chalk it up to a misunderstanding on my part, of which I'm still confused about but willing to apologize and let go.

Exactly how was I projecting the argument onto you? You responded to my post, I wasn't responding to anything you said. As noted, your argument appears to be that I didn't express myself clearly, rather than that I was making an invalid criticism. If that was all you had to contribute, well, good on you. As pointed out, pro-lifers have expressed the claim I was criticizing using the same language I used, so your criticisms seem like little more than opportunistic deflection aimed at disarming the point rather than addressing it.

As for differences between an unborn baby and a new born baby, I never denied there were differences. You know who else has differences? Newborns and 30 year olds. Severely mentally impaired people and neurotypical people. This doesn't make one more human than the other. We are all human. Male or female, gay or straight, white or black, disabled or healthy, old or young, regardless of stage of life, etc, we are all human beings and as such have an inherent right to life. History is rampant with people trying to dehumanize other people in order to justify taking away their basic human rights. Slavery, the holocaust, and the killing off of the Indians were all excused by saying blacks/Jews/Indians were not quite human "enough". The abortion argument is the same, by saying that unborn babies aren't humans and so it is ok to take their life. A human fetus is simply a very young human, not some sort of non living non human species.

As to your further argument, you claim to be acknowledging those differences while in the same breath asserting that those differences are immaterial. That is nothing but the same argument I am criticizing in a different form. As my original parody pointed out, there are differences between being alive and dead, but if you argue that those differences are immaterial, then the logic leads you to the conclusion that killing innocent people is perfectly acceptable. Since it's not, there's something fundamentally wrong with simply saying that the differences are immaterial. You've yet to actually address my original point.

Furthermore, historically speaking, as the Supreme Court affirmed in its opinion, the right to life has not been extended to the unborn prior to anti-abortion movements of recent genesis. So you may want there to be a right to life for the unborn, but it has not been the position of society historically that they do have such a right. So you are effectively proposing that we extend rights to the fetus which they did not have before. The possession of human DNA on its own is not and has not been considered sufficient justification for the nuovo creation of those rights for the unborn. I'm relatively confident that people throughout history were not ignorant about exactly what was inside a pregnant woman's womb. So you need an actual ethical argument justifying extending these rights to the unborn, not simply your desire that they have such rights. Otherwise you're simply making a political argument, not a moral one.