I see via And Then There's Physics, which led me to Michael Tobis's blog, which linked to another blog called Scary Mommy, which noted in a series of tweets in October by a science fiction writer called Patrick Tomlinson, that he had posed a trolley problem scenario with the alternatives being saving a 5 year old child or a vat of 1,000 frozen embryos. (It's not exactly the same as the classic "trolley", since it just a question of which you save from the burning fertility clinic, given that you can't carry both. It removes the issue of taking a positive action - throwing someone off the bridge, or hitting the switch to divert the train from one track to another - that will lead to the sure killing.) The point is to show anti-abortionists that, at heart, they surely can't perceive embryos as every bit as worthy of "life" preservation as a person already living as an independent human.
I just mention this because I first thought "hey I came up with that idea maybe 4 or 5 years ago." I noted here in 2015 that I had put the argument up at Catallaxy perhaps a couple of years previously.
But then I went back and noted that Tomlinson said he has been using the argument for about 10 years. Oh well. Another case of originality fail.
I still think it's a great argument.
I don't like abortion, instinctively. But I can clearly see that the religious argument that it is a case of life from fertilization that warrants the same protection as all human life makes no intuitive sense, too.
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