On Monday, author and comedian Patrick Tomlinson took to Twitter to boast that he has the strongest argument to defeat the claim often made by pro-lifers that life begins at conception. Tomlinson ’s argument relies on a thought experiment, that puts pro-lifers in a situation he believes offers proof that unborn babies are not alive.
The imagined situation goes like this: You’re at a fertility clinic and suddenly a huge fire breaks out. You are trying to escape and notice a five-year-old boy trapped. There are also “1000 Viable Human Embryos” in peril as well. Here’s the catch: you can save one, but not the other.
His grand argument is that everyone will choose the youngster over the embryos over the embryos.
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. 1/
— Patrick S. Tomlinson (@stealthygeek) October 17, 2017
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. 2/
— Patrick S. Tomlinson (@stealthygeek) October 17, 2017
In his subsequent tweets, Tomlinson claims that he hasn’t gotten a straight or honest from pro-lifers, and that he never will, despite how pro-lifers know to pick the five-year old.
He also launches into typical pro-choice criticisms of the pro-life movement. These latter points in particular about patriarchy and controlling women don’t have much to do with life beginning at conception, or who is the better choice to save in this scenario.
This question absolutely evicerates their arguments, and their refusal to answer confirms that they know it to be true.
No one, anywhere, actually believes an embryo is equivalent to a child. That person does not exist. They are lying to you. 7/
— Patrick S. Tomlinson (@stealthygeek) October 17, 2017
They are lying to you to try and evoke an emotional response, a paternal response, using false-equivalency.
No one believes life begins at conception. No one believes embryos are babies, or children. Those who cliam to are trying to manipulate you so they can control women. 8/
— Patrick S. Tomlinson (@stealthygeek) October 17, 2017
Don't let them. Use this question to call them out. Reveal them for what they are. Demand they answer your question, and when they don't, slap that big ol' Scarlet P of the Patriarchy on them. The end. 9/9
— Patrick S. Tomlinson (@stealthygeek) October 17, 2017
Despite his confidence and claims that such a question “eviscerates” and “destroys” their argument, it didn’t take long for pro-life Twitter to fire back with a response.
Ben Shapiro answered the question with four main arguments that offer a pretty thorough dismantling of this alleged impervious hot take. Here they are:
1. Instinct does not equal correct or justifiable
Shapiro argued that even if there is “the moral instinct to save the child, [t]hat does not mean that the instinct is either correct or justifiable.”
You’re standing at the fork in a track for a runaway trolley. On one side of the track is a man tied to the tracks; on the other side are five people. You choose to throw the switch to save the five people, presumably. But now comes the second part of the hypothetical: instead of standing at a fork, throwing a switch, you’re standing above a single track on a bridge. Five people are still tied to the track. Conveniently enough, there is a single fat woman standing atop the bridge with you. If you throw her in front of the train, you can stop the trolley before it hits the five people. Most people say they wouldn’t do it. Does that mean that the five people below are not humans, or that it is morally correct to avoid tossing the woman?
2. What if there are no humans?
Shapiro again presents a devastating blow to the argument at hand when he asks the questioner what would happen in his scenario, adding a twist to Tomlinson’s hypothetical. What if there are no other humans on earth except the 5-year-old and the embryos. What then?
Do you save the five-year-old and doom the human species to extinction, or do you save the embryos? In this case, potential human life outweighs current human life. Does that mean the five-year-old is no longer a human being? Does it prove, according to Tomlinson, the value of embryonic life?
Just because there’s a difficult choice before you, that doesn’t mean one or the other is not human. Put any two lives in that scenario – your mom and dad, for example. If you choose mom, does that mean dad is not human? Of course not.
3. Already born vs. unborn life
Shapiro discusses the doctrines of “passive abortion” which isn’t intentionally ending a life, but trying to save the life of one when there is no option to save both. According to Shapiro:
Virtually every religious system, including Catholic religious doctrine, allows passive abortion (the moral equivalent of this case) in order to save the life of the mother. Let’s say a woman has cancer and she requires chemo in order to cure it, but the chemo will result in the death of a fetus. There is no third option. Catholic doctrine suggests that the doctor bears no moral responsibility; the abortion is a byproduct of saving the woman’s life. So Tomlinson’s hard choice doesn’t remotely demonstrate the valuelessness of embryonic life.
4. Not reality.
Shapiro argues that this scenario is so far fetched to anything remotely resembling reality that it just doesn’t work. For example, in the hypothetical, the would-be hero wants to save both lives. In real life, those seeking abortion aren’t trying to save anyone, and they’re zeroing in on one, determined only to kill it. The scenario is so far off, Shapiro says, that “using such a hypothetical to justify a doctor killing thousands of fetuses out of pure convenience is simply ridiculous.”
Other points are worth raising when rebutting Tomlinson ’s hypothetical, which is trying to catch pro-lifers, even smear them, by getting to what he thinks is the base of the entire movement, that life begins at conception. While this scientific fact is indeed what the movement is based upon, his points do nothing to address or counteract the biology of what actually occurs at conception, namely the resulting new being which is already a human person at the moment of conception, is a human in the earliest stages of development, and will continue to develop until he or she is ready to be born, usually 9-months later.
Instead of trying to address this science, Tomlinson turns to a grandiose hypothetical that at first glance seems witty, but under closer examination (in this case, a few paragraphs from Ben Shapiro) it quickly withers.
Unsurprisingly, after a short back and forth on Twitter, Tomlinson later blocked Shapiro.