I think everyone prioritizes the life of the mother. It's just a question of what that means. If it means that one of them is going to die and we're asking if we have the right to terminate the pregnancy to save the mother's life, everyone I know says yes (although they are heartbroken by the situation). From a morality standpoint, there's never a great answer to the "who would you save" question

I obviously object to the phrase "potential life." An egg is a potential life. A sperm is a potential life. An unborn child is a life with potential. It's as close to black and white as anything can possibly get. The biology could not be more clear.

I'm all for having existing members of society achieve their best, but you seem to have a lot of hidden assumptions about what that means. Why would furthering your career (or whatever unspecified pursuit you have in mind) count as achieving your best, but not raising a child?

Again, this is why we need to get back down to some kind of firm foundation. If it's just my opinion that raising children is the most important thing that people do in life and you think the most important thing is something else that children are a potential obstacle to, there's no way to sort out the disagreement. It's like arguing if cottage cheese tastes good. It's just a preference and there's nothing deeper to it. But you and I certainly haven't been talking as if that's the case. We've both tried to be persuasive. So what is the underlying set of values that we could appeal back to?

I very much sympathize with the notion that it's tough to see a child born into poverty. But is it better to be dead than poor? I don't think most poor kids would agree. You used some language that really scares me in that section. You made an appeal to what is "far more beneficial to everyone." Yikes. That's a horrifying way to reason when it comes to human life. And it lets you justify almost anything. The reason why the US and Christianity have been so good for humanity is that they introduced the concepts of the dignity of the human race and individual rights. Instead of writing groups of people off because it's convenient for some vision of what is "beneficial to everyone" you have to respect everyone's right to 1) live and 2) be free.

I really want to linger on your last point of the paragraph because I think this is crucial: "You see that (abortion) as the unjustifiable murder of the unborn." Is that just the way I see it or is it the way it is? There are three key phrases:

Unborn

Murder

Unjustifiable

Unborn is pretty straightforward. By definition, if we're talking about abortion, the child has yet to be born.

Murder is a little more tricky, but not really. I think we all recognize three components that make up murder, which we can define as the premeditated killing of a human being.

Premeditation: It's something you planned out. This definitely applies to abortion. All abortions are premeditated

Killing: A living being was alive until your intervention ended its life. There's no doubt that this one applies.

Human being: We're talking about abortion in humans here, so these are human babies who will one day grow into human adults (if they aren't killed)

If you only have two of three, it's not murder. So my premeditated killing of an ant I saw in my house wasn't murder. Assault isn't murder if the victim doesn't die. Self-defense isn't premeditated (to use the old judicial phrase, there is no malice aforethought) and so it isn't murder.

With abortion you have...all three. It's not even like you kind of, sort of have all three if you adopt some sort of biased point of view. You have all three, clear as crystal.

So that just leaves us with "unjustifiable." I won't offer any commentary here, just a question: What could justify the murder of an innocent child?

I'm totally with you on the last section about building something together. I'm trying my best to persuade, inspire, and help people reach higher. This was a major point of my original post: We need to find common ground on which to build together because Christianity and national unity aren't going to cut it anymore. I'm not sure if you meant this conclusion as a reason why abortion should be legal. Correct me if I'm misreading you, but the insinuation seems to be that abortion restrictions represent the desire to coerce? The obvious problem that I have with that is that while it is clearly true in general that we need to refrain from coercion, there are obvious exceptions (e.g. no murder, no rape, no slavery, no theft, etc.). So the question is does abortion fall under the category of things where we can't use coercion (most things), or does it fall under the category of issues where we can (and should) use the necessary amount of coercion? The answer is pretty clear. Abortion restrictions are a subcategory of the absolute, number one most pivotal rule that we can and should enforce: No murder.

But even if I adopted some sort of hyper-libertarian (borderline anarchist) framework that said that the government can't prohibit murder because such a restriction is coercive, I would still strongly oppose murder. It's just that instead of arguing that it's wrong and should be prohibited, I would argue that it's wrong and screw the government. Which, I'm not going to lie, sounds kind of fun and appeals to the part of me that was once a teenager. But I don't consider it to be a serious notion.