I’m getting tired of this unevidenced argument, too. All it does is distract from the main argument, and it is only brought up during abortion debates. If it were true, it needs to have it’s own thread, in my opinion.
Easy metric there - amount of life left. How about a two-year old versus an eight-year old? (Which was how I read your answer first.) You’d have a dilemma, right? No such dilemma versus the embryos, however.
By your answer I deduce that you are okay with abortion to save the life of the mother. Am I correct?
So you think that the only people who care about people after they’re born are pro-choice? You think that the ~50% of the US population who express views against abortion are so different than you that they are monsters who don’t give a crap about children being gunned down?
There are “consistent life ethic” pro-lifers out there. For example, Consistent Life and All Our Lives are two organizations that are trying to promote post-birth concerns along with being pro-life.
One of my favorite examples is Daniel Berrigan, who has engaged in civil disobedience on many peace and life issues.
So, yes, some pro-lifers may very well be hypocrites, just as humans of all types can be, but some aren’t.
And regardless, an argument doesn’t cease to be true just because the person expressing the argument is a hypocrite.
Pro-choicer people often engage in a lot of hypocrisy too.
For example, how many pro-choicers do you know who think that fathers should be forced to pay child support? How many pro-choicers would be outraged if someone argued that female genital mutilation should be safe, legal, and rare because “they’ll just do it anyway”?
Yes, as a pro-lifer, I think your questions raise some interesting points.
It is possible to believe that an embryo is a separate human life while also realizing that saving a born child is more practical than saving a group of frozen embryos. Like others here, I would probably choose to save a young child instead of 5 elderly people, but it’s not like I don’t think the elderly have a right to life. It’s just an attempt to be practical.
In fact, I think in vitro fertilization just strengthens the pro-life argument. When we have the technology to grow embryos in petri dishes and implant them in women who are not the biological mother, the old pro-choicer argument about how abortion is just “the right to do what I want with my body!” is clearly inadequate. It completely ignores the moral status of this separate entity that can grow apart from your body under the right circumstances.
Would you cry harder if your own 2-year-old daughter died, or if you heard that 10,000 people were killed in an earthquake in China? The Chinese are human beings too, right?
If you were told that you had the choice to have one of the following die: a 2-year-old little girl who was standing right in front of you or 5 random people you’ve never seen in China, what would you do? Would it be an easy choice?
I would generally try to protect the embryos if it didn’t risk myself or another post-birth person to a great degree. Does that mean I think embryos have less value? Maybe. Does it mean that I have certain human emotions that would make me react in a certain direction even if it didn’t seem to logically fit with my beliefs? Definitely.
I might take some risk to save the embryos, but a big factor in that is that they might be extremely valuable emotionally to someone else.
You know, philosophers spend their whole lives trying to figure this stuff out. The rest of us just do the best we can.
I would save the embryos. Then you can make lots more little girls to die in fires.
What if the pregnant woman is a crack addicted whore serial who killed nine of her customers, and the non-pregnant woman is a scientest on the verge of making a new breakthrough that will save millions of lives?
One anti-abortion protestor told a woman “Your baby might be the next Steven Hawking.” I added “or Ted Bundy.”
Sigh… don’t you love it when people like Czarcasm come up with absurd hypotheticals that are supposed to prove we who oppose abortion are hypocrites?
He may regard this as dodging the question, but it’s not. The reality is, a principled right-to-lifer WOULDN’T be working at a fertility center filled with frozen embryos in the first place! Lest we forget, the Catholic Church has always disapproved of creating and freezing embryos.
So, if a devout Catholic right-to-lifer is working at a fertility clinic that stores frozen embryos, he/she is already doing something the Church opposes.
Sigh…not all right-to-lifers are Roman Catholic, which is why that particular denomination isn’t mentioned in the OP.
edited to add: Just to remove your imaginary “gotcha”, what if you were in the building for some other reason, and a fire broke out?
I once had an anti-abortion protestor tell me “No, I don’t think frozen embryos should have to be implanted. But they shouldn’t be murdered.” Just let them live in limbo the rest of their lives.
Good points, especially the second. Gotcha!*
*No reason, except that some in this thread seem to be expecting it for some reason, and I’d hate to disappoint them.
Clearly the mother has given permission for eggs to be taken from her body for this purpose. I doubt you’d support them being taken against her will. And IVF inherently does not bring all these embryos to term. That shows most don’t act as if they are persons.
I wonder how anti-choice laws would fare if they had to be tied with anti-IVF laws. Think of the parents picketing with their children who would not have been born if pro-lifers had their way.
What if the embryos were going to grow up to be serial killers?
There’s always a catch to immortality.
What if the Hitler embryo was going to also discover the cure for cancer?
[ul][li]Save him[]Have him discover the cure[]Then have him discover a time machine[]Go back and save the two year old[]Put the Hitler embryo where the two year old was[]Bring one of the other embryos forward, and place him in a Jewish family[]Then bring the now-Jewish adult back and place him where the Hitler embryo was[*]Shoot the two year old.[/ul]Easy as pie - not an abortion in sight.[/li]
Regards,
Shodan
Are you saying that it isn’t just the fact that they are embryos, but it is also how much you identify with those you would save? You have memories of being a young girl, but no memories of being an embryo-am I on the right track here?
Yes, and no, respectively.
I look forward to a pro-life movement that’s pro-life throughout life. I’ve been waiting for such a movement for a few decades.
And I won’t say there’s nobody out there who fits that bill, but the pro-life politicians are the same ones who are cutting food stamps and unemployment insurance, and refusing to accept the Medicaid expansion. All of which is a big “fuck you, poor kids, once you’re born. Now you’re no longer precious innocent lives; you’re moochers and takers, and you know how we feel about those.”
And the politicians who vote that way, do so because they’ve been voted into office by people who want them to vote that way.
I’d be delighted to see pro-life politicians fighting for the welfare of born children who made the mistake of choosing less than ideal families to be born into. I could get along with people like that, and I’d regard our disagreements to be less profound than our areas of agreement. But no such movement of any political significance exists.
I have a relative who needed fertility treatments, and ended up with 5 kids. There are two more frozen embryos. She doesn’t want more children but recognizes that by the moral standards of her religion, she can’t just leave the embryos be or have them destroyed. What’s going to happen is that she’ll stall until she can’t have kids any more, and then the decision will be made for her, and she won’t have to feel bad about it.
The net effect is the same: she’s just passively murdering the embryos.
Which of course is the exact same thing as not feeding a baby and letting it starve to death.