I’ve never posted on the topic of abortion before. When I was a Christian fundamentalist, I was naturally “pro life” (or better described as anti-abortion). Before I completely left the faith, my views on abortion began to change as I gained more knowledge of medical science.
Recently, the Friendly Atheist brought attention to Patrick S. Tomlinson’s twitter post. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a quick read. He makes a compelling point.
Whenever abortion comes up, I have a question I’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.
Patrick’s post is a thought experiment. You have to pick one choice or the other without changing the scenario. When I was a hard core Christian fundamentalist, I would likely have refused to answer the question. But now that I’ve left the Christian fairy tale behind, it’s an easy answer. I’d save the five year old because embryos aren’t babies.
Someone else made another compelling argument in response to Patrick’s twitter post that I wanted to share. He said:
I like pointing out that if life begins at conception, then, according to Christianity, all those aborted souls would go to heaven. If all abortion is illegal and those ‘souls’ are allowed to be born, probability will dictate that not all of them will become Christian, and those that are not will go to hell. So, by outlawing abortion, you are condemning people to hell, who would otherwise go to heaven.
He’s got a helluva a point too, don’t you agree?