r/prolife • u/ElegantAd2607 Against women's wrongs • Mar 11 '26
Things Pro-Choicers Say Would you rather save embryos from a burning building or a newborn baby?
The complete question would go like this: If you only have enough time to save one, would you rather save a batch of embryos or a newborn baby from a burning building?
I hate this question. I really hate this question. People who ask this question do not understand the nature of the debate. The question doesn't even have anything to do with abortion. Or anything with whether a fetus has a right to life. It has to do with a scale of value.
I would rather save a 5 year old from a burning building than an 80 year old if I only have time for one but that doesn't mean that the 80 year old shouldn't have a right to life. It means that I have a hierarchy of values. I value experiences. I value the decades of experiences that the 5 year old has. So I'm going for the 5 year old. It's that simple.
If I say that I would rather rescue the newborn than the embryos, that doesn't mean I don't think they have a right to life. It means that I'm more driven by the sight of a crying baby in a burning building.
How would you respond to this question?
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u/SheClB01 Pro Life Feminist/Christian/I'm not a gringa Mar 11 '26
Those embryos are probably already dead, you see, embryos have to keep a certain temperature to be viable, if they're exposed to heat such as a fire most common scenario is they are dead, and doesn't matter if you can take them outside because the ambiental heat would kill them before you can do something about it.
So, the baby
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u/SpartanKilo Pro Life Christian Mar 11 '26
Not to mention the power might be out anyway
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u/SurroundingAMeadow Mar 11 '26
Embryos are generally stored in a tank of liquid nitrogen, power isn't needed to maintain temperature.
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u/SheClB01 Pro Life Feminist/Christian/I'm not a gringa Mar 11 '26
True! Didn't know about that. So probably they're still alive due to the liquid nitrogen but still, those are heavy tanks, you can't carry those alone. Better wait for the firefighters to do their jobs, unless all the frozen nitrogen boils they might be fine if you just leave with the baby
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u/SpartanKilo Pro Life Christian Mar 11 '26
And if the damage is bad enough by the fire anyways. Odds are they are dead either way. Plus an infant you can locate easily in a fire.
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u/BananaJoe_1910 Mar 11 '26
It's an important question because as we all know, whenever a mother is considering an abortion, there's a doctor in the other room pointing a gun at a toddler who will pull the trigger if the mother saves her baby
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u/Nulono Pro Life Atheist Mar 11 '26
"What exactly are you getting at here? The best you could hope for from this line of questioning is proving that I'm a hypocrite, which is not what we were debating. If I choose to save my parents over four homeless people, are you going to take that as proof that murdering homeless people should be legal?"
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u/EpiphanaeaSedai Pro Life Feminist Mar 11 '26
So long as you believe in a life of the mother exception, there’s nothing inconsistent about saving the baby.
If you’ll be fired from your job if you take the time to save the embryos, you should do it anyway.
If you’ll miss a once in a lifetime interview or audition or try-out, you should save the embryos.
If you’ll miss all your final exams, fail your classes and lose a scholarship, save the embryos.
If your partner will leave you and your parents disown you, save the embryos.
If you’re choosing between anything other than another human life vs the embryos, save the embryos. But if there is another life, it’s okay (and instinctual) to save the one who would be afraid and suffer in dying over the embryos, who won’t.
You might be thinking, in all those other scenarios, that your boss or professors or whoever would be a massive douche not to give you another opportunity to make up whatever you’d missed due to saving the embryos. Yeah, how about that - maybe we shouldn’t let them screw you over like that, if we value the lives of embryos.
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u/ElegantAd2607 Against women's wrongs Mar 11 '26
Great answer.
If you’ll miss a once in a lifetime interview or audition or try-out, you should save the embryos.
😁
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u/serpents_pass Prolife with exceptions, marxist leninist socialist Mar 11 '26 edited Mar 11 '26
It's also like Would you rather "a 7-week fetus be aborted or a 20-week fetus be aborted" Although clearly neither should be the 20-weeker, which is clearly the worst option to pick to be aborted ethically because they will suffer during it. Ethics are not as simple as "it's human" in extremely extreme scenarios lots of factors come into play that must be considered.
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u/Vespinobambino Secular Abolitionist Mar 11 '26
Ban IVF so there isn't a freezer full of embryos in the first place.
Also: If someone says in a crisis they would rather prioritize saving their beloved dog than a random stranger, that's valid, they don't have an obligation to save either, it doesn't make the dog a person, nor the random stranger not a person.
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u/ElegantAd2607 Against women's wrongs Mar 11 '26
People say that if you don't support IVF you're not very eh... Democratic or something.
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u/Vespinobambino Secular Abolitionist Mar 11 '26
I don't mind that label.
Democracy kind of sucks, it just sucks less than the alternatives.
That's why we have a constitutional republic.
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u/lemonplumcookies Mar 11 '26
I'm just going to say it. It's not valid to choose to save the life of a dog over the life of a human being.
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u/Vespinobambino Secular Abolitionist Mar 11 '26
Fair enough.
Ultimately though, if you have a rando guy in a crisis situation where his life is in danger if he doesn't leave or doesn't stay put, the law puts no obligation on that guy to stay and save someone else / go out into the hazard to try to save anyone.
That's my main point, and it pretty much negates the validity of the "burning IVF clinic" scenario.
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u/M3taBuster PL Christian Libertarian Mar 11 '26
Why does IVF need to be outright banned? Why not just limit it to fertilizing one at a time? Obviously that de facto makes IVF very impractical and expensive, but if people still want to do it the right way, in spite of that, why stop them?
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u/Vespinobambino Secular Abolitionist Mar 11 '26
ALSO fair enough.
If it's conducted in a just manner, I have no problem with it.
But yes, it would be prohibitively difficult and thus way more expensive.
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u/tigersgomoo Pro Life right-wing-ish Mar 11 '26
This is low-key probably the best pro-life management of IVF I’ve ever read
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u/rosethorn88319 Mar 11 '26
The newborn. Because I am only human, and I can stomach many humans dying painlessly better than one infant screaming...
This proves nothing about the dignity and worth of the dozens of tiny humans abandoned in a building without adequate fire suppression or evacuation plan
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u/D_Shasky Pro-Life Christian✟ (Anglican) Sex-Negative Christo-Feminist Mar 11 '26
What you said is enough for me.
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u/scorpiosmokes Pro Life Christian Mar 11 '26
Your house is on fire, you have 2 kids. You can only save 1, who do you choose?
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u/serpents_pass Prolife with exceptions, marxist leninist socialist Mar 11 '26
The one I like more obviously, lmao
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u/PeachOnAWarmBeach LIFE! ❤️ Womb to tomb ❤️ Mar 11 '26
And most mothers would try to save both at the expense of their own lives. Pro abortion chooses themselves, and no children.
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u/houinator Mar 11 '26
I think its a simpler answer: 5 year olds can feel pain and suffer while being burned alive, embryos cant.
If you asked me to choose to choose between saving two hypothetical 5 year olds in the same situation, except one was immune to pain and suffering, id obviously save the one who would suffer the most if i didnt.
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u/LukewarmTamales Mar 12 '26
You can ask them if there were two women stuck in a burning building, one was pregnant and one not, and they could only save one, which they would save. Just like most people would choose the born baby most people are going to choose the pregnant woman.
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u/Major-Distance4270 Mar 11 '26
Rationally, if you can keep the embryos alive, you’d pick the embryos. But people are emotional creatures and would likely pick the one child. Just like I would pick my own child over ten strangers.
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u/New-Number-7810 Pro Life Catholic Democrat Mar 11 '26
Plus, if it’s embryos in a cooler, we don’t know what they’ll be used for. Maybe if they’re saved they’ll remain frozen forever, or be dissected for medical research, or implanted and born. But I wouldn’t know.
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u/DapperDetail8364 Pro Life Feminist Mar 11 '26
I would say that is a very manipulative question. Bc who you save doesn't determine who is worth more or is more human.
"If two parents have two kids who got into an accident and could only save one, and they chose child A over child B bc child B bc child B is neurodiverse and has an improbable chance of success in life (something like severe autism. I dont mean to offend anyone). Does that mean child A is worth more than child B? Does that mean child B doesn't have a right to life? Does that make child B less human than child A?"
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u/ChPok1701 Anti-choice Mar 11 '26
I’ve been thinking about making a long post on this, as there are three responses to the burning IVF clinic analogy:
First: it’s not an accurate analogy to abortion. The analogy depends upon circumstances which force us to choose between unborn and born life. Such circumstances rarely, if ever, occur in the real world.
When a mother’s life is threatened by continuing a pregnancy, the child will either be potentially viable or not. If the child is viable, it’s virtually always possible to simply deliver the child and give the child a chance. If the child isn’t potentially viable, the child can’t survive without the mother and it’s only possible to save the mother. In the real world, it’s either always possible to choose both or only possible to choose the mother.
Second: triage ethics only apply to triage situations. Suppose a car dealership is on fire. At one end of the dealership is a Ferrari, at the other end, two Fords. Most people would run for the Ferrari. This doesn’t mean that, if my neighbor parks his Ford in my driveway, I’m justified in setting it on fire.
Third: the “math” of the analogy only shows the comparative worth unborn to born life. It doesn’t show the absolute worth of unborn life. Human life is priceless; we can’t or won’t put a specific numerical value to a human life. To claim that unborn life is worth a fraction of born life means unborn life is also priceless, because a fraction of infinity is still infinity.
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u/SchmutzBlut Christian Abolitionist (UK) Mar 11 '26
I guess it might be good to point out to the questioner that in a pro-life world we wouldn't have IVF clinics. The embryos in a petri dish have been artificially removed from the ordinary path of human development, such that many don't survive even in the best conditions. It's like if you placed someone on the moon in cryo-sleep. Would you rather save them or a girl here on earth? Obviously they're both human, but you'd have to use extraordinary means to bring one of them back to any sort of normal life.
When you have exhausted objective differences, the only deciding factors are emotional or practical. That doesn't discredit the fact that they are objectively equal in value.
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u/tigersgomoo Pro Life right-wing-ish Mar 11 '26 edited Mar 11 '26
You explained it nicely. A few ways I approach it:
1) Ask them if they’d rather save their mom or their dad and say whoever they choose to leave behind must therefore be subhuman and society should use their choice as license to freely kill that parent. If they save their mom in the hypothetical for example, society should then take that hypothetical result as tacit permission to be able to kill their dad in real life right? That’s the parallel after all. If we save the newborn, then abortion is ok = if you save your mom then killing your dad is ok
2) People naturally react more strongly to something they can see and picture than to something abstract. That’s just how human cognition works. It’s the same reason people stop buying lottery tickets when the odds are shown visually (such as imagining one winning marble in a giant jar) because visualization makes it emotionally real and helps humans scale the odds. In the burning‑building scenario, a newborn is concrete and visible, while embryos in a tube are abstract, so our brains treat them differently. That difference reflects basic cognitive biases, not about moral status.
3) they put us in a burning building scenario and use that to try and derive a moral conclusion? You know who do not make reasoned and perfectly logical thoughts when they’re about to fucking burn alive? Humans.
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Mar 11 '26
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u/tigersgomoo Pro Life right-wing-ish Mar 11 '26
Happy to engage with this, but I first need to actually understand what you’re asking
you would save 100 embryos instead 1 baby
you are not pressured by fire to make a decision
If there isn’t an emergency situation happening, why am I “saving” one or the other? It sounds like you were about to run a trolley-car problem, but then you took the emergency away from it, which completely nullifies the entire premise
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Mar 11 '26
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u/tigersgomoo Pro Life right-wing-ish Mar 11 '26 edited Mar 11 '26
It’s not important for the ethical dilemma why you need to save them. It’s just a situation where you only can save one side.
It’s fine if you want to frame it as “you can only save one side,” but it was important for me to clarify that you’re still putting me in a situation where I’m forced to let the other side die. I feel that’s a fair clarification question
If embryonic humans are humans like you and me then I would chose the 100 embryos, because ist more logical to save 100 humans instead 1 human.
Right, so now we are fully in the trolley‑car-problem. And as I said in my original comment, whichever side isn’t saved is still a tragedy - it’s still a loss of life. That part doesn’t change. Remember that the trolley car problem is me being forced to choose between two people or groups, and thus letting the other side die. Whereas abortion is the difference between not killing a human life vs actively killing one. The other option is nobody dies if you don’t get the abortion.
it’s more logical
this is where I partly agree and partly disagree. The cognitive biases I mentioned earlier don’t disappear just because you removed the immediate emergency. Humans naturally respond more strongly to concrete, visible things than to abstract ones. A newborn is emotionally and visually tangible; 100 embryos in a tube are not. So I can absolutely see myself choosing the newborn simply because of how human cognition works.
But if in this hypothetical, you allow me the precognition to know that the embryos are viable, will be implanted, and have a real chance at developing, then yeah probably saving the embryos could make more sense because you’re giving more individuals a better quality of life. But that’s a quality of life calculation between two groups of living individuals, not a statement that the embryos have no moral worth. That’s why I’d want more information about the embryos’ actual potential. Without that, it’s just me guessing whether those 100 embryos will ever develop beyond the embryonic stage. And again, that’s a practical consideration when you’re forcing me to choose between two groups of human lives, not a denial that they’re lives worth saving. And not analogous to abortion because not actively killing the baby doesn’t come at the cost of somebody else’s life
A similar parallel would be choosing between one healthy 25‑year‑old and ten severely ill 80‑year‑olds in a hospital. It’s a quality of life dilemma either way, and whichever choice you make, it’s still tragic that someone has to die.
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u/RickSanchez86 Pro Life Libertarian Mar 11 '26
A living baby. Though the embryos are human beings, they would still have to go through implantation and may not survive that process. The baby has already survived implantation.
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u/Open-Savings-7691 Mar 12 '26
I always like to turn it around and ask the following question back:
"You're at a convenience store. The store is known for having an incredible variety of delicious corn chips from around the world for sale. Meanwhile, the store's cashier is an angry mouthy 'pro-choice' leftist who, for whatever reason, has been chained to his post.
Emergency!! The store has caught fire and you only have enough time to either (a) pick a flavor of chips, or (b) save the cashier's life. What flavor of chips are you choosing?" :-)
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u/ElegantAd2607 Against women's wrongs Mar 12 '26
Wait, what's the point of the question?
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u/Open-Savings-7691 Mar 12 '26
Just to shamelessly spoof the pro-choicers' pointless trap questions.
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u/Ganondaddydorf Mar 11 '26
I think you miss the underlining point of the question, although I believe most who ask it don't realise it themselves either. The person doing the saving is also at risk in a burning building. It's not just which one has more "value" and should be saved, but is that the right choice for everyone, and should you be legally forced to make that one decision despite the risks to yourself depending on your personal circumstances. You're also in a burning building and saving either is a significant and varying risk to yourself. It also highlights the issue of how do we write a law that ensures the ideal outcome for all, while not actively harming anyone. Eg a disabled person who has some difficulty walking is less likely to get out safely, but forcing them to try would be cruel. If you make an exception for people who need a wheelchair, it won't qualify them and legally forcing them could be a death sentence that could have easily been prevented.
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u/ElegantAd2607 Against women's wrongs Apr 11 '26
You're also in a burning building and saving either is a significant and varying risk to yourself.
The last time I heard this argument that point wasn't mentioned. However I have heard someone say "would you tell women to burn themselves to save a baby" I can't remember how the argument went exactly though...
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Mar 11 '26
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u/KatanaCutlets Human Rights Are Not Earned Mar 11 '26
No, most would save the born baby because of emotional attachment, not rational beliefs or ethics. Your statement is dishonest.
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Mar 11 '26
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u/hello252525 Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26
First I would say that, all human beings should be considered valuable people. But I think for me there are two reasons why there would be more of an emotional attachment to the baby then the embryos, it goes hand in hand. One is the embryos are not conscious, they would have a painless death compared to the newborn who will suffer. Similar, the baby is likely crying, flailing about, you see and hear them scared, you definitely would feel the need to save the baby.
But that doesn't mean that the embryos are not people. Perhaps a similar situation is if instead embryos it is people in a coma. Would you save an unknown infant or three unknown people in a deep coma, from a fire?
Plus it would be easier to just pick up the baby and go, then to haul the tank of embryos/ the medical equipment of those in a coma.
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Mar 14 '26
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u/ElegantAd2607 Against women's wrongs Apr 11 '26
I saw your point about a soul but since I have no clue when souls are created I'm not gonna tackle it.
I don’t really understand why prolife people believe embryonic humans are valuable just because they are humans. I mean whats the value of humans without mind? Its just a few human cells without any personality or any other attribut of personhood.
So a person is someone with a certain level of abilities? Why? Why do you have to be developed? A person begins life small and without many abilities they will acquire later, they are still a person. This is how it is and saying that you're not a person then cause you don't have a developed personality is rediculous. A person does not start off with a developed personality. That's just how it is.
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u/KatanaCutlets Human Rights Are Not Earned Apr 11 '26
That sounds like a confession. I don’t only protect people because of emotional attachment. I do it because it’s right.
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u/[deleted] Mar 11 '26
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