One Born Life vs. Many Unborn Lives – Which Is More Significant?

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Imagine you’re walking down the street. A fire has just broken out at a fertility clinic. You rush in to help. In one corner, you see a 5-year old girl standing near the door. In another corner, you see a tray of 2 in-vitro fertilized eggs. There is enough time to save only one of the two. You are faced with a choice. Save the girl who is clearly a living human, or save the 2 fertilized eggs – both potential future humans. It’s quite a dilemma, isn’t it?
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A few days ago, I posted ‘Viagra + Birth Control + McCain + Reporters = Disaster‘.  In it, I argued that the decision of covering the cost of Viagra and not birth control by insurance companies should not be made solely based on religious reasons. I presented that Viagra can be used for many more sinful acts than birth control. For instance, birth control can be used by non-married people, while Viagra can be used by both non-married people and gay men. Therefore, religion should oppose Viagra more strongly than it does birth control.

I am not advocating that Congress should pass legislation requiring insurance companies to cover the cost various medications and pills – far from it. That is not central to the premise of my post. I only argue that employing religion as motive and rationale in such decisions is injudicious.

I received a deluge of personal emails and one comment by Milo criticizing my approach. Their argument revolved around the central idea of sanctity of life. Milo went one step further by saying that it is not a stretch to believe Viagra promotes life while birth control suppresses it. He’s right; it’s not a stretch. The question, however, is this: how is the worth of an unborn life measured against the already born? And before you roll your eyes up, irrespective of which side of this issue you are on, be prepared to examine your beliefs.

Consider the following example:

Imagine you’re walking down the street. A fire has just broken out at a fertility clinic. You rush in to help. In one corner, you see a 5-year old girl standing near the door. In another corner, you see a tray of 2 in-vitro fertilized eggs. There is enough time to save only one of the two. You are faced with a choice. Save the girl who is clearly a living human, or save the 2 fertilized eggs – both potential future humans. It’s quite a dilemma, isn’t it?

If your religion dictates that life begins at the moment of conception (or fertilization in the case of fertility treatments), then you must logically save the contents of the tray and not the girl. A fertilized egg represents a life according to (at least) Christianity. And if your choice is to save the tray, then you clearly place a higher value on 2 unborn fertilized eggs than you do on 1 living and breathing born human. You should now pause and contemplate your choice which, you must admit, seems somewhat inhumane.

If you are not bound by religious views, you’re more likely to save the girl. But even though you are likely to not consider fertilized eggs as actual humans, you do understand that they have the potential of becoming humans someday. Don’t you? Would you not rather save 2 humans instead of 1 – albeit you may have to wait a while for those humans to be born?

Try to contemplate your choice if the tray contained 100 fertilized eggs rather than 2. Will you alter your decision? What if the tray contained 1000 fertilized eggs?