Best responses to the burning IVF lab analogy?

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RamistThomist

Puritanboard Clerk
You might have seen this on social media by abortion types. If you are in a burning IVF lab (I know, it's a stupid analogy) and you have a choice between saving, say, a baby or a young child on one hand, and ten frozen human embryos, which do you choose?

What are some of the best responses to this?
 
Yeah, just because they can set up a scenario and force a choice between two options does not mean that you have to acknowledge the two options, or that by selecting one you're saying that the other is "less valuable."

It's like saying: "If there is a burning fire in your home and you can save only your son or your daughter, who do you choose?" Just because I can formulate a scenario doesn't mean that we are compelled to play along, nor does it mean that we imply one is more important than the other.
 
To quote Jeeves, "The contingency, madame, is a remote one." No one is ever going to be inside a burning IVF lab.

Yet it's not entirely stupid. It does force us to reflect on the nature of personhood and duties/responsibilities in ethics.
 
To quote Jeeves, "The contingency, madame, is a remote one." No one is ever going to be inside a burning IVF lab.

Yet it's not entirely stupid. It does force us to reflect on the nature of personhood and duties/responsibilities in ethics.

In the scenario created by the disgusting, despicable, devilish abortion lovers there is a fire in a facility that creates the fact: someone, of necessity, is going to die. You can't save everyone, you can only save one, who is it going to be?

This scenario plays more along the lines of a real-life scenario of a pregnant mother having some terminal condition that can only be treated at the expense of the life of the unborn, or some other similar situation. Yet the execrable and energumenical fans of the culture of death have intentionally constructed a fallacious analogy in which the death of at least one is a given, in order to seek to buttress their abominable practice of elective abortion.

Of course, once we recognize that we're dealing with a scenario in which one is necessarily going to die and we're talking about one's duties/responsibilities in terms of ethical or moral priority in helping us decide which one to save, then fine, we can have the discussion. But that discussion, and the analogy that birthed it, really have nothing in common with the presuppositions that undergird the wrong, wretched, and wicked practice of elective abortion.
 
Another tentative response I have:

The argument assumes that there is some form of ethical calculus involved. But as all refutations of utilitarianism show, there are no calculuses involved in ethics.
 
Due to the apparent combustible nature of IVF labs it may be safer for everyone to shut them all down.
 
Due to the apparent combustible nature of IVF labs it may be safer for everyone to shut them all down.

Yes, when those tanks of liquid nitrogen cook off, I'm thinking that there might be several vacant lots. So no one is likely to get out of there alive.
 
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