Abortion

[k-onmmunist]

Pro-choice is the rational position - you can't say that the POTENTIAL for something is that thing. Abortion should be legal until life is in fact viable, which is up until the third trimester. To all pro-life posters, I ask of you - would you make masturbation illegal? Would you have people taken out of bed in the middle of night and thrown in prison for having a nocturnal emission? After all, sperm is POTENTIAL for life.

[k-onmmunist]

Pro-choice is the rational position - you can't say that the POTENTIAL for something is that thing. Abortion should be legal until life is in fact viable, which is up until the third trimester. To all pro-life posters, I ask of you - would you make masturbation illegal? Would you have people taken out of bed in the middle of night and thrown in prison for having a nocturnal emission? After all, sperm is POTENTIAL for life.

Sperm is potential for life in a different way, in that it's entirely unclear what a sperm might meet with, what other gametes might be involved. With a fetus the potentiality has already been realized in the first case and it's more or less clear what's what, since the gametes have already fused and the new person is already under construction.

Nobody is arguing that people should be punished for allowing individual gametes to do something other than fuse, and considering how biology works that is an absolutely ridiculous straw man.

You can't draw a boundary like that though. Both are the potential for life, but a sperm isn't viable life and neither is a foetus until around 22-24 weeks.

[k-onmmunist]

Pro-choice is the rational position - you can't say that the POTENTIAL for something is that thing. Abortion should be legal until life is in fact viable, which is up until the third trimester. To all pro-life posters, I ask of you - would you make masturbation illegal? Would you have people taken out of bed in the middle of night and thrown in prison for having a nocturnal emission? After all, sperm is POTENTIAL for life.

False analogy. Haven't we already addressed that argument (on this forum, no less)?

Masturbation, although immoral, does not present the same issue as abortion, because in the former there is no joining of a sperm and egg. I also dispute your description of a fetus as a "potential for life".

1. Lol at masturbation being "immoral".
2. If you take a sperm or a foetus out of its environment, it would die. Neither are viable life (well, the latter is, but only after 22-24 weeks, as I've said) and so it's nonsense to make a distinction between them if you're going to take the attitude that "potential for life" is the same as life itself.