-I'm asking questions to get at the core of the belief. I strongly suspect anti-abortion folks just regurgitate that talking point "except for rape and incest" without ever fully considering what it means for their argument.
I got that, it still makes the manner in which you were trying to point it out make you seem every bit as obtuse.
There's plenty of them that absolutely do not care about murdering certain people (as in you can find some of them saying that mentally handicapped people should be killed to keep them out of the gene pool or to keep them from having to pay money to support people like that; and you can also find them saying stuff like that kids from women on welfare - which they happen to believe is predominantly black - well its not a big deal if they die as they were never gonna contribute to society anyway), so I don't think you're actually pointing out some grand contradiction that isn't already readily apparent in a lot of other ways.
It has to do with the premise of the argument. If once conceived that embryo is a human baby and should be protected by murder laws, then killing that baby for any reason should be murder.
Think of it this way, if there is no difference between a embryo and a child, then in the case of incest would it be okay to kill her 5 year old son (from incest) as well? If not then we are obviously saying that an embryo is less than a full human child.
No, it really doesn't because playing similarly stupidly obtuse just makes you similarly stupidly obtuse. That's my point. I mean, I explicitly mentioned that I believe he was trying to highlight the ridiculously stupid logic that anti-abortion nuts rely on (which I am fully aware of, I have absolutely no clue why both of you tried to explain it like I didn't, did either of you read my post beyond the first sentence?). My point being, don't resort to the same type of bullshit because you'll just end up looking as stupid.
Have you had to actually talk to some of these people? Because some of them would be very ok with murdering various people, so there is not some huge contradiction in that they view babies as uniquely innocent beings because that's what their religion teaches them. And uh, yeah, some of them viewed mixed race children as people that should be killed as abominations. That's the types of mindset that these people evolved from.
That is what I am pointing out as well, they don't actually believe that a fertilized egg is a person or there would be no incest or rape arguments. No one would argue it is okay to kill a 5 year old because he was the product or rape or incest. Then if you actually believe that a embryo is a child the same as that 5 year old, then killing it should be just as horrific. Almost no one, even in the 'abortion is murder' crowed, believes that. Therefore they understand the difference and their arguments are not made in good faith.
If you get to know some of these people, they might just argue that type of shit and there's a lot of them that wouldn't actually care. It seems they'd generally prefer to sterilize poor people and while they often will go out of their to not specify, you can clearly get the hint that non-white people should especially be considered for such treatment. I grew up in area where that type of thinking was far too common (in high school for a class we had to find a topic to debate on - where we had to do a speech on it in like a debate format but we weren't debating anyone, it was stupid and holy shit were people's arguments awful, so I just made up some shitty one defending video games against idiots like this teacher who was also head of the "forensics" club which did debates and she said that she would not allow anyone in basically either area to use abortion as their topic because "I know more about it than you do" and this was a fucking English teacher that I guarantee knew jack shit about biology and medicine; her and a couple of other teachers tried to get another teacher fired because they were all anti-abortion and the other teacher was pro-choice which led to me getting fucked over in a class because of a situation that they tried to use to get her in trouble over).
They know how horrible it is which is why they tend to put those ideas in company that they assume agrees with them on this shit (see a similar example, in another thread, someone pointing out people they knew that would for some reason decide well since they were white they would be totally ok if they said some racist shit around them; they'll do the same shit with abortion and other stupid shit that they know comes off ridiculously badly but they really believe it but don't want to get called out for how awful it is).
I could rant for quite a long time about the amount of ridiculous fucked up behavior that seemed normal to these type of people that would make a lot of people go WTF. If you didn't live there or were around them long enough you'd never know because they put up a total sham facade of this over the top politeness because they know it would make them look like goddamn terrible assholes. The worst part is there are quite a bit of people that are legitimately nice, so its hard to know which is which and it actually helps those awful ones get away with shit. But these days, they've been emboldened to express themselves more openly thanks to social media, so calling them out is no longer getting them to see how awful it is until it basically blows up into a media situation, and even then they're not sorry about anything other than being exposed and ridiculed. We're starting to see it some but the stuff we've seen is like barely scratching the surface of the type of shit that has been going on in social media.
I say a lot of that as someone that because I was around that type of behavior actually partook in it some because that was so normalized. Well by partook in that, I don't mean the anti-abortion shit, more that I've definitely partaken in way off color talk (typically just referencing stuff like movies and mostly as a teenager or young 20s because I was dumb and thought edgy was anything more than just edgy for the sake of being edgy on a lot of that shit; or was blind to how it was normalizing fucked up behavior, that with age and maturation I can clearly see how screwed up it was). But the people I'm talking about have lived that their whole lives, its what they were taught, it was preached to them, taught at home, it wasn't just youthful stuff, in fact it scares me how many people I grew up with, that used to be much more laissez-faire that have had those toxic ideas solidify and become cornerstones of how they live their lives. Shit that they used to see for being hypocritical bullshit that they're now imposing on others like their kids or rationalizing in whatever way they can (like how they're pushing for charter schools, to "get away from the riff raff" which you can often see signs "riff raff" really just means those screwing up their white homogeneous view, but if you point out how that's enabling racism then holy shit nah they're so not racist that you're the racist they never mentioned race it was you so you're the racist!!! also they have black, hispanic and/or asian friends!).
There's a lot more to this and its already far beyond the point of this thread.
Cliff Notes:
I get how absurd anti-abortion logic is
Its not as contradictory to their real beliefs if you actually get to hear some of their real beliefs
Yes its bullshit, so don't play stupid like them to try and highlight their stupidity, it'll just make it seem that both sides are similarly stupid, undermining your side (same way they duped people into "both sides!" idiocy).
One last key piece, understand that their religious belief tells them that babies are uniquely innocent (well if they've been properly baptized) which is why there's no real disparity or contradiction in their beliefs because to them babies are more pure and more vulnerable than yes even kids (which is why they're ok with endangering kids in the variety of ways they've decided is acceptable with their other beliefs like not getting them vaccinated or letting them spend a lot of time alone with other adults like clergymen). If you understand that it lines up perfectly with their other distorted logic, you can see that arguing against it with actual logic will never matter or accomplish anything (and they are deliberately twisting science to support their beliefs; which is why they're becoming more unhinged and insistent on it these days, they're looking at ultrasounds and going "see that's a human face!" or "see if you poke it, it reacts/feels pain!").