In the latest video in Live Action’s Pro-Life Replies series, the organization’s founder and president Lila Rose debunks a claim in which some say it’s impossible to be pro-life: the “burning IVF clinic.”
To describe the scenario, Rose asks viewers to imagine they’re in a burning IVF clinic and have to choose between saving a five-year-old child or a container with 10 frozen embryos. Because most people would instinctively save the five-year-old, Rose says abortion advocates have used that response to show that embryos don’t have equal value to people who have already been born; therefore, abortion should be permissible.
To show the fallacy of this argument, Rose makes a slight change to the scenario, asking viewers to instead imagine that they were forced to choose between a family member and a complete stranger. Natural instinct would lead anyone to choose their family member over the stranger, but that doesn’t negate in any way the stranger’s humanity or value, nor does it give anyone moral permission to actively kill strangers.
“In the same way, a person’s choice to save a five-year-old over the embryos does not make the embryos less human or less valuable or give anyone moral permission to kill embryos,” she explains.
Rose then presents another similar scenario, a sinking ship like the Titanic. In that event and others like it, women and children were the first urged to enter the lifeboats. But Rose points out that that doesn’t mean men were any less human than women and children, and it also doesn’t mean that we are allowed to kill innocent adult men.
Both the burning building and sinking ship scenarios ask us whom we will save when we tragically can’t save everyone. As Rose points out, “Abortion, by distinction, is about directly and intentionally killing a child in the womb by dismemberment, lethal injection, starvation, or exsanguination, which is draining blood from the baby’s body. With the burning building, it is the fire that kills. With abortion, it is one stronger human, the abortionist, actively and intentionally killing another, weaker human being.”
“In life, it is not always possible to save everyone,” she concludes. “But we should always strive to refrain from intentionally killing an innocent human being, including someone waiting to be born.”
