Tweets from a pro-choicer

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I found this thread of tweets. How would you respond?

“ Whenever abortion comes up, I have a question l’ve been asking for ten years now of the “Life begins at Conception” crowd. In ten years, no one has EVER answered it honestly.

It’s a simple scenario with two outcomes. No one ever wants to pick one, because the correct answer destroys their argument. And there IS a correct answer, which is why the pro-life crowd hates the question.

Here it is. You’re in a fertility clinic. Why isn’t important. The fire alarm goes off You run for the exit. As you run down this hallway, you hear a child screaming from behind a door. You throw open the door and find a five-year-old child crying for help.

They’re in one corner of the room. In the other corner, you spot a frozen container labeled “1000 Viable Human Embryos.” The smoke is rising. You start to choke. You know you can grab one or the other, but not both before you succumb to smoke inhalation and die, saving no one.

Do you A) save the child, or B) save the thousand embryos? There is no "C”. C means you all die. In a decade of arguing with anti-abortion people about the definition of human life, I have never gotten a single straight A or B answer to this question. And I never will.

They will never answer honestly, because we all instinctively understand the right answer is A. A human child is worth more than a thousand embryos. Or ten thousand. Or a million. Because they are not the same, not morally, not ethically, not biologically.

This question absolutely evicerates their arguments, and their refusal to answer confirms that they know it to be true. No one, anywhere, actually believes an embryo is equivalent to a child. That person does not exist. They are lying to you.

They are lying to you to try and evoke an emotional response, a paternal response, using false-equivalency. No one believes life begins at conception. No one believes embryos are babies or children. Those who cliam to are trying to manipulate you so they can control women.”

Forget about the factual flaws like “How big is the fire” or “Those embryos are in a container that could survive” or so on.
 
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Using that logic, nobody can ever respond to a mass casualty situation because you might not be able to save everybody , or have to make split second decisions!

Nice try, but this person is just messing
 
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susanbherald said:
I found this thread of tweets. How would you respond?
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I wouldn’t. Seriously, you found a thread of tweets? Is this a person you know? Why would you want to enter into a 144 character fray on Twitter with people you don’t know?

Also, that seems longer than what Twitter allows. So, hmmm.

Also, this isn’t an original thought of the person— I’ve seen this exact item floating around the internet for years.
 
The child for a few reasons
  1. The embryos surviving will take more than getting them out of the fire.
  2. It is more of an emotional response so I’d give back the scenario with a few changes
    a. A child related to you and conjoined twins who are not
    b Two women, one pregnant and one not.
Lets see their response to b in particular.
 
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Heard of this before. It seems fairly airtight, at first.
But a couple things:
-An already born life is of course the right thing to save over viable embryos which, at the moment, cannot grow on their own (not been implanted in a womb, have no nutrition supply, etc) and have not actually begun any track of development.
-This does not refute or disprove anything. Even if a life still in the womb were worth less than an already born child, this is not a real world scenario. The real world scenario is counseling before an abortion, wherein the unborn life that is (only hypothetically, for the sake of argument) worth less than the born child is still a life, and should be preserved.

Tricky mental gymnastics, apparently, but there’s really not much there.

Also, it’s not as if it’s unbelievable that one would make a severely wrong decision in the heat (get it?) of the moment based only on what we can discern with our senses.
 
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I think Brian Holdsworth answered this pretty well in his video

 
Obama and Hillary are in a house on fire and you can only save one. Will you make the racist choice and save Hillary, or will you make the sexist choice and save Obama? 🤔

Even this ridiculous example is more of a dilemma than the situation posed on the Twitter feed. Unlike the embryos, neither Hillary nor Obama will be in immediate danger of death if their freezer is unplugged. 🙂
 
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It is not a question of worth.

Unless I have a cryogenic tank in my handbag, how am I going to save frozen embryos?
 
Key word thread. It’s not one tweet, it’s a multitude. This person’s thread was spread around in 2017. I just wanted to know what other pro-life people thought
 
You find yourself trapped in a burning apartment building. In one corner is a male 5 year old, and in the other is a female 5 year old. You know that you can only choose one to save. Who do you choose?

I remember the tweets. The author thinks that forcing someone to make a choice between saving one or the other- as if that’s what the abortion debate is at all about- somehow “slams” those of us who value life. Using my example, you could just as easily accuse the author of sexism for choosing to save the boy or the girl over the other child, and these “thought experiments” do literally nothing to serve either side.
 
You can also YouTube and see Ben Shapiro’s response to that same bunch of tweets.

Ultimately, your answer doesn’t tell you whether you view life as equal, just shows you which option you are emotionally attached to. Eg. Your baby boy vs a teenager you have never met. You might be more likely to rush in for your kids, but that doesn’t mean you think your child matters more or that killing teenagers is hence morally okay.
 
Those of us who have been involved in pro-life have heard that one a thousand times, same with the “violinist” and all of the other little “gotcha” games.
 
As a counter-question, replace the child and the box of frozen embryos with two women. Both are 25, both are strangers, but one of them is pregnant. Which do you save?

I have a feeling most would choose to save the pregnant woman, because they know instinctively that saving her means saving her baby’s life as well.
 
Yup, I have actually heard this argument before. It is intended to trick you, a gotcha.

OPs question
First of all what is the actual chances I would ever be in that situation where I would have to make that choice. Secondly, of course you would try to save whom you could. Of course you would grab the kid.
That same argument, but with a different spin, if I was in a burning building with 20 people that all need my help to get them out, I probably wouldn’t be able to save everyone but I would like to think I would keep going back in and grabbing as many people out as I could before I could not go in there anymore. So does that make those other lives that I could not save less worthy, no it does not, it just means I did the best I could.

Hope that made sense
 
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Is the child crying for help? If so, it would clearly be wrong to ignore their cry for help, wouldn’t it?
 
This is such a stock argument at this point it’s very annoying rather than useful.

Compulsory actions really doesn’t determine objective moral worth in terms of humanity.

If I save my mother in a fire rather than the tweeter’s mother, that doesn’t mean that my mother is more human than the tweeter’s.

Ridiculous argument. It’s plainly addressed in almost every pro-life apologetic I’ve read/watched.
 
susanbherald said:
They are lying to you to try and evoke an emotional response, a paternal response, using false-equivalency. No one believes life begins at conception. No one believes embryos are babies or children. Those who cliam to are trying to manipulate you so they can control women.”
Click to expand...
My reply would be that a LOT of people believe that a pregnant woman is indeed pregnant with a baby. A unique person with it’s own DNA. This is not information that is trying to get some kind of emotional response. It’s science. It’s the truth.
 
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