Should I do this?

I think I will.

In 2017, a man by the name of Patrick Tomlinson created a tweet thread that went viral. It was a thread that supposedly “shuts down” the arguments by those who consider themselves pro-life. We are just so ridiculous to believe the fetus is a separate being from the mother who deserves human rights, right? Wrong. According to The Independent, the thread goes as follows:

Whenever abortion comes up, I have a question I've been asking for ten years now of the "Life begins at Conception" crowd. In ten years, no one has EVER answered it honestly. It's a simple scenario with two outcomes. No one ever wants to pick one, because the correct answer destroys their argument. And there IS a correct answer, which is why the pro-life crowd hates the question. Here it is. You're in a fertility clinic. Why isn't important. The fire alarm goes off. You run for the exit. As you run down this hallway, you hear a child screaming from behind a door. You throw open the door and find a five-year-old child crying for help.They're in one corner of the room. In the other corner, you spot a frozen container labeled "1000 Viable Human Embryos." The smoke is rising. You start to choke. You know you can grab one or the other, but not both before you succumb to smoke inhalation and die, saving no one. Do you A) save the child, or B) save the thousand embryos? There is no "C." "C" means you all die.

In a decade of arguing with anti-abortion people about the definition of human life, I have never gotten a single straight A or B answer to this question. And I never will. They will never answer honestly because we all instinctively understand the right answer is "A."

Follow the link above to see that he continues to attribute malicious motive to his opponent. As with any conversation, let us not resort to rudeness, ad hominem attacks or insulting the opposition in any other capacity. Stick with the argument presented because inappropriate behavior will make our argument look weak and will say more about us than it will about them.

Also, PragerU has an intriguing analysis about abortion in their video titled “The Most Important Question About Abortion”

Now back to it. There are two main points that make his argument tragically flawed.

First, he is correct when he says that, for many, the initial reaction would be to save the 5-year-old child as opposed to the embryos. He uses this to attempt to demonstrate that their value is not equal to a child. However, this poses a problem. Let’s take a famous thought experiment known as The Trolley Problem as an example.

If you followed the link provided, you will see that this is very similar to the problem Mr. Tomlinson poses. Humans are flawed beings; therefore, our moral instinct may not be 100 percent consistent and in the case of the Trolley Problem and Mr. Tomlinson’s question, it is even more so because in both situations it is logic that is absent simply because of the fight or flight response that is triggered by a threat of survival.

Second, this is the false dilemma fallacy, which is probably the biggest problem with his argument. That means that it is falsely an either/or situation. One thousand embryos are not that many so you can probably pick up a container with that many with one hand and pick up the child with the other, presenting a third option. Also, he never really talks about the severity of the fire. The storage containers (with 10,000+ embryos) could almost certainly survive a moderately sized fire, just in case we still had to choose A or B.

In general, the problem with the pro-choice side is that many (not all) of them believe that the child is not a human being yet; that it is simply a bundle of cells and, therefore, it is not a life. However, it is scientifically proven that life begins at fertilization. To ignore the scientific evidence that life begins at conception is to blatantly ignore reality and the empirical evidence provided to us.

While there are many people on the pro-life side who consistently cite the Holy Bible for their rationale, I do not because that is an appeal to an authority that others might not believe based on the lack of specific, measurable and observable evidence.

The judgement of the science and logic is clear and unambiguous. Life begins at conception, Mr. Tomlinson’s question is flawed at its very foundation, and we have proved both without calling him a liar or wrongly accusing him of trying to invoke certain emotions.