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These seem substantially different in that each time of having sex is an either/or of conceiving or not, but each instance of nicotine consumption only very marginally increases cancer risk. No one is going to get cancer because they tried smoking a couple of times, but they very easily could conceive a child on their first time having sex.
Why not? People get lung cancer without ever smoking as well. There very well could be some non-smokers whose lung cells were, just due to dumb luck and coincidence, 1 inhale away from becoming cancerous, and 1 puff triggered it. Probably not many, though.
Which, I think, gets at the issue that this argument is about quantity, not quality. Is sex -> pregnancy more like driving or smoking, where you could reasonably do it tens of thousands of times and still not get the consequence, or is it more like playing Russian Roulette with 6 bullets, where your odds of surviving is the odds of the bullet or gun being defective plus of your aim being off enough either to miss or cause non-fatal damage (actually 1-(1-(odds))*(1-odds)), I think, but that's a good-enough approximation), and by how much? I think most people place the line somewhere in between for determining the morality of elective abortion, and it's the different places where people put that line that cause conflict. Especially since many of those people don't even seem to recognize that they're placing such a line, much less where that line is for themselves.
I think a problem with the smoking metaphor is that it does seem like sex/pregnancy is closer to Russian roulette. Besides Russian roulette, a matching metaphor could be rock climbing/falling to your death; flying/plane crash; or driving a car and crashing it. While sometimes people have sex with the aim of conceiving, all of these other "bad" outcomes are things that would make people just never do a given activity if they thought it was at all likely to happen in that instance.
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