Hello, friends. Welcome to the Case for Life podcast. We aim to help you articulate your pro-life views more persuasively. It’s great to have you with us today. Going to talk a little bit of politics and a little bit of religion. We’ll get both in. But before I go further, I want to give you a teaser here. If you have not already gotten a copy of the Case for Life second edition, can I encourage you to get it? Everything I’m talking about on this podcast gets covered in the pages of this book. And I will say so myself, I’m proud of the book because it really does reflect my thinking over the years. And as you can see, it is quite the book. It’s big, thick, and will take a lot of your time, but you will master the pro-life position if you get this. You can get this at scottklusendorf.com. along with an opportunity for you to sign up for our course that we offer there that will equip you at a very sophisticated level to make a case for the pro-life view. We interact with the best thinkers on the other side, people like Jubilini Minerva, Peter Singer, Michael Tooley, Kate Griesley, and others, David Boonen. You’ll want to get that course and equip yourself to make the case for life in the strongest sense of the term. Okay, today We’re back talking about politics. I didn’t want to, but here we are. There is an argument that the Democrats and others are putting forward in this political cycle. It keeps coming back. I keep thinking it’s been refuted and people can see how silly an argument it is, but it keeps coming back. And it’s this argument here. It’s called the Burning Research or Embryo Rescue case. And it goes like this. Your pro-abortion critic, in their attempt to defend abortion, says to you the following. Oh, you don’t really believe your pro-life views. You don’t really believe abortion is wrong. And I can demonstrate you don’t by appealing to your deepest intuitions. And then they’ll say the following to you. Imagine you’re in a burning research lab. The building’s an inferno. You only have time to save one of 2 groups of people. You can save a group of embryos over here in this corner, Off to that way. There’s a thousand of them. You can save them or you can save a 5yearold girl who’s in the opposite side in another corner. You don’t have time to save both. Which are you going to save? Now, we have dealt with this on this podcast a couple of times before, but because it’s a hot item again in the political cycle we’re in, I thought I’d go ahead and just deal with it one more time in case anybody missed the previous times we dealt with this. Okay, let’s first of all make a very important observation, and that is this. What is this analogy about? Is it about who we ought to save or who we get to intentionally kill? And the answer is obvious. It’s about who we ought to save. Right away, you ought to see there’s a mismatch now with abortion. Abortion is not about who do we get to save or who ought we save. Abortion is about who do I get to intentionally kill? That is, do I have a right to intentionally kill unborn humans? That’s what abortion is about. This analogy is more of a triage question. Who ought I save given limited resources? So right away, the analogy is off the tracks. But there’s more wrong with it than just the analogy being off the tracks. Secondly, I would point out this. How does it follow that because you save one human over others, in this case, the 6yearold over the embryos, that the ones left behind are not fully human? Suppose, for example, I’m in a burning building somewhere, anywhere, doesn’t matter, and I have a choice of saving ten thousand people or my own daughter. Who am I going to save first? You’re right. I’m going to save my daughter first. I won’t shoot the others on the way out, but I will save her first because I have a duty to her as my daughter that I don’t have to the strangers that are in the building. Now, that doesn’t mean that the strangers left behind are less human or less valuable. Here’s the thing. We all have equal value, but we don’t all have an equal right to be rescued. For example, the Secret Service will save the president over a city of six million people. If Washington, D.C. is about to get nuked, They’re going to whisk the president out of there ahead of the six million that are left behind. It doesn’t follow the six million left behind are not fully human, nor does it follow that they are less valuable and have less intrinsic dignity than the president. It just means that the cost to national security of losing the president is is far greater than losing those left behind. It’s not a question of value, it’s a question of what is going to have more of a catastrophic impact on the nation. So we’re not making a value judgment in rescuing the president first, but notice we’re also not killing those left behind. They get killed through an attack from a foreigner, but we’re not the ones shooting them up, okay? So this analogy really misses the mark in so many ways. But I think there’s another thing we can point out. Our intuitions are not as settled as pro-abortionists want us to think on this issue. They want us to think that because our natural intuition is to save the 6yearold first, which all of us would do, That therefore, that means the embryos in question are not fully human and valuable. But our intuitions aren’t as settled as they would like us to think. And let me give you some examples of this. Let’s change the analogy up just a little bit. Suppose the issue were saving the 6yearold girl or your frozen embryos. In other words, your offspring that’s on ice. And let’s say you had ten embryos on ice that you and your wife had created and you were saving for a time to implant them when it would work for you to give birth to these embryos, hopefully. What if it were your embryos and the 6yearold girl? Now our intuitions start to change up a little bit. Or let’s make it even more plain. Let’s say it’s a choice between saving two hundred cancer patients in the final hours of life. They are dying. They are unconscious, but they are clearly human beings. And nobody would argue they’re not, hopefully. But they are dying from their pathology, their illness. and they’re not going to be with us much longer. They’re unconscious, they don’t feel anything. We can save them, or we can save ten frozen embryos. Now where do our intuitions go? I think our intuitions go to the embryos, and here’s why. Because they have a greater chance of survival. They can make it, potentially, while the cancer patients cannot. So we save the ones most likely to survive. That’s not unethical thinking. That’s just clear triage thinking here. So this analogy does nothing to settle our intuitions that the unborn are not human. It does nothing to prove that intentional killing is okay, since the analogy is about who we ought to save. And quite frankly, it doesn’t do anything to argue against equal human rights at all stages of development, embryo, fetus, newborn, adult. All of us have an equal right to life and we have equal value, though we don’t have an equal right to be rescued. That’s why this analogy fails. You’re going to hear it a lot in this election cycle. You’re going to hear it a lot in the days ahead as these states put forward ballot initiatives to try to write abortion into their state constitutions. Don’t fall for it. It’s not a good analogy and it certainly does not prove the unborn are not human and valuable. Thanks for joining us today. I hope you’ll join us next time. Again, if you haven’t visited our social media sites, please do so and give us a like there and spread the word about what we’re doing here. We’d appreciate it. Till next time, I’ll see you then.