I'll be honest, this type of "gotcha" interrogation is both ghoulish and pointless.
For the latter, the people who already agree with you won't agree with you harder. The people who disagree with you won't suddenly change their minds. The wilfully ignorant will twist themselves into pretzels to remain willfully ignorant. It accomplishes nothing.
And for the former, this really comes off like asking a gun rights advocate what his favorite way of killing someone is. Yes, yes, I know someone is just itching to shout "guns are Constitutionally Protected and abortion isn't", but let's set that aside for a second.
Quite honestly, the goal of an abortion is a dead fetus safely extracted from the host mother. The method really doesn't matter. You still get a dead fetus, whether you use a magic pill that teleports it into the sun or an industrial vacuum to remove it by parts.
And for anyone who wants to make a moral "you're killing a person" argument, understand that, for anyone who isn't an adherent to the whole "life begins at conception" idea, a fetus isn't a person; it hasn't developed any of the characteristics that define personhood besides a shared DNA structure. And, quite frankly, calling a fetus a baby in this context is trying to emotionally manipulate people by making them imagine a full grown and birthed 9+ month old infant getting shoved into a blender, instead of the weird chicken-fish hybrid looking thing that a fetus spends the first four months resembling. This adds to the ghoulishness of the interrogation, and puts people off, circling back around to the pointless nature of it.
Abortion IS ghoulish. Abortion is straight up ending a human life at its most vulnerable. You can split hairs all you want about time and location, but there's a reason "You should have been aborted" is a horrible thing to say to someone. Guns are used for food, sport and self defense far more than they are for murder. Trying to "Gotcha" someone about the use of guns is like a vegan telling a carnivore about how brutal butchering is. Life is harsh, and sometimes you have to be harsh right back to deal with it.
People NEED to have their noses rubbed in the reality of what abortion fundamentally is, because people file it away under "Women's rights/Healthcare" and then lock it up tight to dodge the cognitive dissonance of "This is literally a mother committing infanticide to dodge the consequences of her own actions." It's Kronos devouring his children, writ large.
Confronting the process of Abortion being considered a "gotcha" is the same kind of euphemism treadmill that makes any term describing the LGBTETC become a slur over time. The thing that is being described is inherently offensive on a fundamental level, which is why we're just not supposed to think about it and accept it.
I'd like to say first, before I disagree with you, that I do appreciate that you argue in good faith and express your views properly, unlike how a lot of the gutter scum of the internet just throw an attempt at a pithy rejoinder on top of an insult, pat themselves on the back, and walk away. It's refreshing to have a discussion, instead of the usual tripe.
That said, I'd like to address your points in order. For the first point, your argument basically proves my own. You specifically label a fetus as a human life, and base your argumentation around the idea that a human life carries some inherent value, even when the organism that actually makes up that human is simply not there. Notice how you focus on "human" and I specifically keep saying "person"; the two are deeply intertwined, but not actually synonymous (which, if we ever actually make AI and/or find aliens, a lot of people are going to need to come to terms with). A fetus is an in-progress human, but it's not a person yet. It won't be a person for years, because personhood requires a brain complex enough to develop self-awareness.
You yourself land upon this with your reference to the "you should have been aborted" insult, but you wander away from the logical conclusion; the insult is not denying the human-ness of the person, but instead implying the person-ness of the person being insulted is so sub-par that it would have been better if they had never been. The insultee's human-ness, which is inherent to them, is never brought into question; only the achievements and accomplishments they have made that forms the ontological record of their person-ness is under attack. (Sorry if this bit sounds like an old man repeating himself, but there's only so many ways to say this when reinforcing the premise.)
As for abortion itself, it certainly is bloody and macabre. I doubt the mentality of anyone who disagrees with that. However, so is surgery, and yet we keep at it. Something being unpleasant does not inherently make it bad.
I also agree entirely with you that people need to understand what abortion entails. Too many people think it is, in fact, some magic pill that teleports the problem away. However, as I don't accept the "human life is inherently valuable" argumentation, I must also disagree with you on the notion that the avoidance of consequences is inherently negative. We've built our entire species' history around avoiding consequences. We invented farming, tamed animals, built machines, and raised massive edifices to avoid the consequences of being born as upstart descendents of monkeys, doomed to eat, reproduce, and die in the woods. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting a comforts level life free of consequences or suffering; it's why we're sitting in houses with AC, heating, running water, fridges full of food, and chatting across the globe using the magic boxes of nano-scale runes powered by caged lightning. You mention Kronos eating his own children as a failing, bit that's the moral of the story from Zeus' perspective, and he grew up to be a massive net negative on the local divinities. From Kronos' perspective, his only flaw was not checking that he was eating a baby instead of a stone, and that's more a moral lesson about not blindly trusting people with mission-critical tasks.
Finally, returning to my original point about it being ghoulish, the last point I want to tackle is how absurd it is to try to make a "right and proper" moral argumentation while violating every single practice of proprietary in debate. The congressman, quite frankly, did himself no favors with how he presented himself, while the activist stayed respectably professional despite it. You cannot simply ask what someone's favorite method of killing a man is (or, I mean, you generally can't - I don't know what lunatic standard the Epstein Island Enthusiast political class have developed in their little cabals) and then start going down a list, pausing after each one and saying "is it this one?", and still present yourself as the right and honorable man standing up to evil. There are standards and ways things are done, and this is quite a ways beyond them. So far beyond them that it begins even to discredit his own position to the general audience, who we both know are neither intelligent enough to understand debates nor objective enough to go by anything other than "feels" and "vibes".
A fetus is an in-progress human, but it's not a person yet. It won't be a person for years, because personhood requires a brain complex enough to develop self-awareness.
So anyone who suffers from neurological disorders that prevent them from establishing your threshold of personhood aren't actually human beings and therefore, postnatal abortions are a-okay?
You're missing the point so spectacularly, I cannot tell if you're doing it maliciously or just with great aplomb of foolishness.
Yes, having neurological conditions that prevent you from developing a functioning adult mind preclude you from being a person. No, it doesn't remove your base human-ness.
How you move from that to "let's just murder retards because they are lesser" is your cross to carry.
I'll be honest, this type of "gotcha" interrogation is both ghoulish and pointless.
For the latter, the people who already agree with you won't agree with you harder. The people who disagree with you won't suddenly change their minds. The wilfully ignorant will twist themselves into pretzels to remain willfully ignorant. It accomplishes nothing.
And for the former, this really comes off like asking a gun rights advocate what his favorite way of killing someone is. Yes, yes, I know someone is just itching to shout "guns are Constitutionally Protected and abortion isn't", but let's set that aside for a second.
Quite honestly, the goal of an abortion is a dead fetus safely extracted from the host mother. The method really doesn't matter. You still get a dead fetus, whether you use a magic pill that teleports it into the sun or an industrial vacuum to remove it by parts.
And for anyone who wants to make a moral "you're killing a person" argument, understand that, for anyone who isn't an adherent to the whole "life begins at conception" idea, a fetus isn't a person; it hasn't developed any of the characteristics that define personhood besides a shared DNA structure. And, quite frankly, calling a fetus a baby in this context is trying to emotionally manipulate people by making them imagine a full grown and birthed 9+ month old infant getting shoved into a blender, instead of the weird chicken-fish hybrid looking thing that a fetus spends the first four months resembling. This adds to the ghoulishness of the interrogation, and puts people off, circling back around to the pointless nature of it.
Abortion IS ghoulish. Abortion is straight up ending a human life at its most vulnerable. You can split hairs all you want about time and location, but there's a reason "You should have been aborted" is a horrible thing to say to someone. Guns are used for food, sport and self defense far more than they are for murder. Trying to "Gotcha" someone about the use of guns is like a vegan telling a carnivore about how brutal butchering is. Life is harsh, and sometimes you have to be harsh right back to deal with it.
People NEED to have their noses rubbed in the reality of what abortion fundamentally is, because people file it away under "Women's rights/Healthcare" and then lock it up tight to dodge the cognitive dissonance of "This is literally a mother committing infanticide to dodge the consequences of her own actions." It's Kronos devouring his children, writ large.
Confronting the process of Abortion being considered a "gotcha" is the same kind of euphemism treadmill that makes any term describing the LGBTETC become a slur over time. The thing that is being described is inherently offensive on a fundamental level, which is why we're just not supposed to think about it and accept it.
I'd like to say first, before I disagree with you, that I do appreciate that you argue in good faith and express your views properly, unlike how a lot of the gutter scum of the internet just throw an attempt at a pithy rejoinder on top of an insult, pat themselves on the back, and walk away. It's refreshing to have a discussion, instead of the usual tripe.
That said, I'd like to address your points in order. For the first point, your argument basically proves my own. You specifically label a fetus as a human life, and base your argumentation around the idea that a human life carries some inherent value, even when the organism that actually makes up that human is simply not there. Notice how you focus on "human" and I specifically keep saying "person"; the two are deeply intertwined, but not actually synonymous (which, if we ever actually make AI and/or find aliens, a lot of people are going to need to come to terms with). A fetus is an in-progress human, but it's not a person yet. It won't be a person for years, because personhood requires a brain complex enough to develop self-awareness.
You yourself land upon this with your reference to the "you should have been aborted" insult, but you wander away from the logical conclusion; the insult is not denying the human-ness of the person, but instead implying the person-ness of the person being insulted is so sub-par that it would have been better if they had never been. The insultee's human-ness, which is inherent to them, is never brought into question; only the achievements and accomplishments they have made that forms the ontological record of their person-ness is under attack. (Sorry if this bit sounds like an old man repeating himself, but there's only so many ways to say this when reinforcing the premise.)
As for abortion itself, it certainly is bloody and macabre. I doubt the mentality of anyone who disagrees with that. However, so is surgery, and yet we keep at it. Something being unpleasant does not inherently make it bad.
I also agree entirely with you that people need to understand what abortion entails. Too many people think it is, in fact, some magic pill that teleports the problem away. However, as I don't accept the "human life is inherently valuable" argumentation, I must also disagree with you on the notion that the avoidance of consequences is inherently negative. We've built our entire species' history around avoiding consequences. We invented farming, tamed animals, built machines, and raised massive edifices to avoid the consequences of being born as upstart descendents of monkeys, doomed to eat, reproduce, and die in the woods. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting a comforts level life free of consequences or suffering; it's why we're sitting in houses with AC, heating, running water, fridges full of food, and chatting across the globe using the magic boxes of nano-scale runes powered by caged lightning. You mention Kronos eating his own children as a failing, bit that's the moral of the story from Zeus' perspective, and he grew up to be a massive net negative on the local divinities. From Kronos' perspective, his only flaw was not checking that he was eating a baby instead of a stone, and that's more a moral lesson about not blindly trusting people with mission-critical tasks.
Finally, returning to my original point about it being ghoulish, the last point I want to tackle is how absurd it is to try to make a "right and proper" moral argumentation while violating every single practice of proprietary in debate. The congressman, quite frankly, did himself no favors with how he presented himself, while the activist stayed respectably professional despite it. You cannot simply ask what someone's favorite method of killing a man is (or, I mean, you generally can't - I don't know what lunatic standard the Epstein Island Enthusiast political class have developed in their little cabals) and then start going down a list, pausing after each one and saying "is it this one?", and still present yourself as the right and honorable man standing up to evil. There are standards and ways things are done, and this is quite a ways beyond them. So far beyond them that it begins even to discredit his own position to the general audience, who we both know are neither intelligent enough to understand debates nor objective enough to go by anything other than "feels" and "vibes".
So anyone who suffers from neurological disorders that prevent them from establishing your threshold of personhood aren't actually human beings and therefore, postnatal abortions are a-okay?
You're missing the point so spectacularly, I cannot tell if you're doing it maliciously or just with great aplomb of foolishness.
Yes, having neurological conditions that prevent you from developing a functioning adult mind preclude you from being a person. No, it doesn't remove your base human-ness.
How you move from that to "let's just murder retards because they are lesser" is your cross to carry.