Uh, "try to give the strongest possible argument for". Opposite of 'strawman.'
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OK cool!
So before I start I want to make it clear that I'm pretty sympathetic to the pro-life position, in general. I don't think yall are insane, or women-haters, or against rights. I myself used to protest abortion clinics. I think your viewpoint absolutely makes sense if-
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you follow certain assumptions. I don't want to come across as disrespecting your position. I'm going to present my (or a steelman of this) position not as an attack on you, but rather as an example of what happens if you tweak base assumptions that are *also* equally reasonable
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So, pro-life often operates on the base of "ending a human life is wrong." This makes sense and is very useful for most things. Ofc we have exceptions - war, self defense. Maybe you're ok with euthanasia? capital punishment? The law isn't absolute. I know there's good reasons
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for the exceptions, but my point here is just that the 'rule' *requires* exceptions in order to function.
Human life is also a kind of weird boundary. Even when I was super pro-life I felt some kind of intuitive stretch when identifying "life at conception" as a human.
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and again - I know you can logically argue this, e.g. "Human is individual living thing with dna and fetuses are different dna from parents". But the first cell union thing isn't recognizeably human to me and I suspect to you either. If hypothetically, deep into the future, we
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ended up with the tech to generate these fertilized egg things at the very basic level, but with no potential to move forward, and we had a ton of them in a building... it feels weird to treat these things as morally equivalent to 'full human life'. We can also blur the idea of
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'human' even further - what if we get the tech to start breeding humans with non-humans? What if we genetically alter DNA until it's not really human anymore? What if there becomes a 'human spectrum'? At what point do they lose their moral right to live?
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But hypotheticals have been really important for figuring out philosophy. Tech today has made many situations possible that weren't before; if someone in 1800 dismissed the hypotheticals of future tech to investigate philosophical questions, they'd be missing out.
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No, I personally never argue hypotheticals when talking about abortion because I don’t think anything compares to pregnancy/abortion well enough to be able to debate with hypotheticals effectively.
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Maybe this is our crux, then. I think hypotheticals are very useful for talking about this - or, at the very least, understanding why people might disagree with you. Hypotheticals are what led me to my own conclusions.
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