A reply to Patrick Tomlinson and his reputed stumper of a riddle for pro-lifers.

sci­ence fic­tion author named Patrick Tom­lin­son has a ques­tion that, if we are to believe the hype, “baf­fles abor­tion foes.” Raw Sto­ry has the sto­ry. What is this stumper of a ques­tion? you ask. Here it is: Would you save one thou­sand embryos or one child in a fire? Real­ly? That’s it? This is the ques­tion that’s sup­posed to con­found us? This is the ques­tion that gets Raw Sto­ry in a heat of excite­ment and Mr. Tom­lin­son many new fol­low­ers on Twit­ter? Real­ly?

Please. This ques­tion is a cliché. You prob­a­bly heard some­thing very much like it in high school. Per­haps your Eng­lish 101 teacher gave it to you as a writ­ing as­signment. If two peo­ple are drown­ing, your moth­er and the pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States, and you have one life pre­serv­er, who do you throw it to?

You could make the ques­tion more inter­est­ing. Let’s say the two peo­ple are your moth­er and your father. You have one life pre­serv­er. What do you do?

Now, there are many ways one could answer this, but they’re not exact­ly com­pli­cat­ed.

• Per­haps I know that one of the two indi­vid­u­als is a bet­ter swim­mer than the oth­er. I am going to throw the life pre­serv­er to the weak­er swim­mer.
• I am going to throw the life pre­serv­er to the per­son who’s fur­thest from the boat, and row to the clos­est one in time to save him.
• I am going to throw the life pre­serv­er to one of them at ran­dom, hop in the water, and attempt to save the oth­er per­son.

In short, you try to out­smart the lim­i­ta­tions of your circum­stances and save both. If you absolute­ly can’t save both, if you know you can’t save both, you make the best choice you can on the spur of the moment. And wise people—those who aren’t com­ing up with a cliché par­lor game ques­tion in an effort to play gotcha—understand that no one can be judged by what he does in such an impos­si­ble sit­u­a­tion. Nor can any real con­clu­sions be drawn from it.

Per­haps I throw the life pre­serv­er to my moth­er rather than the pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States because I know my moth­er, and I love my moth­er, and the pres­i­dent is a stranger to me. It’s an emo­tion­al response. (On the oth­er hand, where the hell are the Secret Ser­vice?)

Mr. Tom­lin­son’s fic­tion­al trap has the same answer: You try to save both.

(Inci­den­tal­ly, there’s some­thing alto­gether sketchy about the fact that these are embryos, rather than babies in a womb, and there­fore were cre­at­ed in a moral­ly illic­it fash­ion in the first place. But let that go. You try to save both.)

But what if you can’t?

Mr. Tom­lin­son thinks he can draw some con­clu­sions here, which in short are that pro-lif­ers don’t real­ly believe that the unborn have equal val­ue as the liv­ing.

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 evis­cer­ates their argu­ments, and their refusal to answer con­firms that they know it to be true.

I sus­pect Mr. Tom­lin­son thinks that, if pro-lif­ers real­ly believe what they say they do, they would view the thou­sand embryos as hav­ing greater val­ue because there are a thou­sand of them, where­as there is only one child.

And the first thing to say here is that this is balder­dash. A sin­gle life—whether born or unborn—has equal val­ue to a thou­sand or a mil­lion oth­er lives. This is a the­o­log­i­cal point. Human life, made in the image of God, has worth indi­vid­u­al­ly, not en masse.

The sec­ond point is the most impor­tant in this con­text. If I were in this ridicu­lous sit­u­a­tion, and if there was some spe­cial rea­son I could save either the embryos or the child in the fire, I’ll save the child in the fire. I say it frankly. I am not afraid of the answer.

And I will tell you why. (Well, one rea­son is that, if you remove the embryos from what­ev­er sit­u­a­tion they are being stored in, they are going to die any­way, so short of stop­ping the fire, you don’t have the choice to save them in the first place. This is the stu­pid­ness of Mr. Tom­lin­son’s ques­tion. But let’s put that to the side.) I will do so because the child in the fire looks human to me; the embryos don’t. It looks to be in suf­fer­ing; the embryos don’t. My choice would be based entire­ly on my emo­tion­al reac­tion to the sit­u­a­tion I was in.

And there­in lies Mr. Tom­lin­son’s error. He thinks he can derive a con­clu­sion about objec­tive real­i­ty based on peo­ple’s sub­jec­tive, emo­tion­al re­sponse in a hypo­thet­i­cal sit­u­a­tion of per­il in which they are forced to make Sophie’s choice. Sophie did­n’t love her one child more than the oth­er. Her one child that she res­cued did not have any more val­ue than the oth­er child that she gave up to the Nazis.

Nor do the embryos have any less val­ue than the child in the fire. One life or the oth­er does not have less val­ue some­how because I am up against human lim­its and have to make some choice. Play­ing Sophie’s choice about it does­n’t real­ly reveal any­thing oth­er than that you like to devise cliché trap ques­tions. This is the kind of subject—do the born have more val­ue or equal val­ue than the unborn—that requires some sophisti­cated the­o­log­i­cal and philo­sophical argu­ment, not too-clever-by-half par­lor games that impress only Raw Sto­ry and the kind of peo­ple who fre­quent Twit­ter.