Letters to the Editor
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Similar Questions from the Late Great William Nealy:
Whitewater kayaker and wilderness guru William Nealy once suggested that if life begins at conception, then people who are 20 years and three months old should be allowed to drink. And anybody born under the sign of Aquarius is now a Taurus!
Conservatives have been framing "trick question" talking points for years, so I should think they'd be prepared for more of the same.
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An argument for us
I recently heard that until the two-week mark, it is still possible for the embryo to split into twins. Therefore, a fetus can't be "ensouled" (that is, become a "person" with a soul, which is the religious argument) until then, because if it happened before that, one twin would end up without a soul. So if you find yourself in an argument with a religious person on this issue (because you like beating your head against walls, I guess), hit them with that and see if they have an answer. I haven't heard one yet.
(This letter is slightly off-topic from the hilarious sputtering response from Wilkow, but hopefully interesting nonetheless!)
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Yes, it is a trick question
...because it makes a lot of assumptions, the chief of which is that no one has an emotional response to a child crying.
Other assumptions:
That people think rationally in emergencies.
That blastulas can live outside a rigidly controlled environment, or that you could get them into the required environment once outside the burning building.
I'm sure you could come up with more if you think about it.
The *real* problem is, that this sort of thing - and both sides do it - undercuts what we really need, and that is a clear, open and *respectful* debate. Increased polarization only makes matters worse. and worse. and worse.
I don't care *who* started it. Stop it right now.
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A ew more-realistic scenarios
I've often wondered why pro-choice advocates don't ask anti-choice people why they don't picket daily outside fertility clinics, which routinely discard embryos. The answer, I think, is that it would be politically unpopular and also expose the ludicrousness of their position.
Regarding the other hot-button embryo issue, stem cell research, ask them, along the same lines, why they have no problem with those embryos being tossed in the garbage but they strenuously object to them being used for research.
And why aren't miscarried fetuses routinely given full church rites and then buried? In some cases they are, but this is by no means the norm.
It would be so easy to go on the offensive, and trip these people up on their inconsistencies, instead of being constantly on the defensive.
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Saving the child is not a contradiction for pro-lifers
This hypothetical question, while thought-provoking and worth asking, does not prove that pro-lifers are wrong or inconsistent about when life begins.
To illustrate why, consider another hypothetical: A fire breaks out in a building and you can save either five rapist-murderers or one two-year-old child. Whom do you save? Most people would save the child, which demonstrates that there are situations in which one might reasonably choose to save a single human life instead of two or more other human lives. But making that choice doesn't require characterizing the rapists as non-human.
Going back to the original hypothetical, there are many reasons that one might choose to save the child over the five blastulae, even if one is firmly convinced that each of the blastulae is a human life. One might take into account that the blastulae have no consciousness, awareness, or ability to suffer. The child has all of these things, would likely suffer greatly--both physically and psychologically--in the fire, and likely has a family that would grieve its loss. Taking these facts into consideration, one would save the child on the principle that the quantity of lives saved is not the only important factor. Preventing pain and suffering is another imperative.
Looking at the abortion debate, you can see that most pro-lifers accept this logic to a certain degree. Most if not all proposed bans on abortion make an exception when the mother's life is in danger. The underlying principle here is that in such cases two lives are in jeopardy; factors such as those discussed above make it obvious why the mother's life should be preserved instead of that of the fetus.
Many people believe that abortion should be allowed only in such life-of-the-mother-versus-life-of-the-fetus cases. Others believe that abortion should also be allowed to prevent the suffering that may occur when the pregnancy threatens the woman's health (but not her life) in some way. Others think that abortion should be allowed to prevent the psychological suffering that a pregnancy might lead to, or to prevent the change in lifestyle or lowering of socioeconomic status that it might result in.
Each of these choices places a different premium on the value of saving life versus the value of preventing suffering. There is a tension between those two goals that is inherent in the abortion debate, which is why it is such a complex and intractable controversy. We may never have a perfectly satisfying answer to the dilemma. We simply have to decide what seems the most ethical and humane balance based on what we know right now.
One thing that we do know right now is that at conception a new organism is created that is alive, genetically distinct from its parents, and a member of the human species. This is a biological fact. You may argue, perhaps persuasively, that at the earliest stages of its life this being is not entitled to the rights that we accord to other human beings. But when you take the easy road and pretend that there is no dilemma, you are doing the very thing that you accuse ignorant right-wing talk radio hosts of doing: refusing to face the tough questions in favor of remaining satisfied with your current opinions.
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Brilliant switcheroo
I believe blastulas are actually called blastocysts. While more hearty than their 3day old embryo counterparts, they are somewhat fragile. Trying to swoop them up will most likely kill them anyway. Obviously, this is a brilliant switcheroo to a scenario-type that right wing bloggers/radio show hosts/pundits love to try and flesh out with their liberal counterparts.