Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
The hypocritical silence of an anti-IVF senator from Ohio

The hypocritical silence of an anti-IVF senator from Ohio

Last updated on: July 25, 2024 at 5:48 pm by Fred Clark

0 Comments

The hypocritical silence of an anti-IVF senator from Ohio 2024-07-25T17:48:20-04:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The MAGA nominee for vice president, J.D. Vance, is a United States senator from Ohio. Like other Republican anti-abortion politicians and anti-abortion activists from Ohio, Vance had nothing to say when a power outage at Cleveland University Hospital’s fertility clinic led to the loss of some 4,000 frozen embryos.

That’s odd and notable. It contradicts everything J.D. Vance pretends to believe about abortion and IVF and “human life begins at conception/fertilization/ejaculation.” Vance claims to believe and pretends to believe that the loss of those frozen embryos is absolutely equivalent to the death of 4,000 babies, or children, or adults. He claims to believe and pretends to believe that he sees no moral or legal difference between what happened at that Cleveland fertility clinic and any other mass-casualty event ending thousands of human lives. Like 9/11 say.

But he couldn’t bring himself to perform that pretending to believe at the time of the clinic’s power failure because he realized that performing a public response commensurate with what he claims and pretends to believe would have seemed monstrous and weird and utterly unbelievable to others and even to himself.

And so, thankfully, Vance and all of the other anti-abortion, anti-IVF activists just ignored this calamity and its disastrous, heart-breaking impact on some 950 Ohio families. Those families experienced the loss of their hopes and dreams of building a family. Some lost what was probably their last chance. They had invested years of their lives and much of their incomes in those hopes and dreams only to lose all of that time and hope and possibility due to one power failure.

But even those heart-broken families would have found it monstrous if J.D. Vance or Janet Porter or the Southern Baptist Convention or any of the other anti-abortion, anti-IVF zealots had responded to that power failure by claiming that this was a worse tragedy than 9/11 because it took 1,000 more American lives. Like everyone else, those families would have found it monstrous and inhuman and weird and gross if Vance et. al. had even tried to say this was a greater tragedy than a school-bus accident in which two or three kindergartners had died.

Because no one believes what it is that J.D. Vance and Janet Porter and the Southern Baptist Convention claims to believe or pretends to believe about IVF. No one.

What they claim to believe and what they pretend to believe is not possible to believe. It is not true. It is not moral. It is not right. It is a lie they tell themselves, but even they are unable to find it convincing.

They know it. We know it. Everyone knows it.

Since it is, apparently, “World IVF Day,” here is a repost from 2016.

(The only amendment I would make to update this post would be to note that J.D. Vance is probably the one guy who would emerge from the burning fertility clinic empty-handed, having rescued neither the little girl nor the tray of embryos.)

I want to talk about a thought experiment, but before we do that, we need to talk about what a thought experiment is — and what it isn’t.

It’s not a debate tactic. Or an argument. The point of this exercise isn’t for Person A to try to convince Person B to change how they think. The point, rather, is to allow both of them to explore what they already think — to perhaps reveal what they think.

Or we might say, to explore and reveal what they feel. So-called “thought experiments” can function as a kind of gut-check. Or heart-check. Or conscience check.

And conscience is really what we’re talking about here. Not “feelings” as irrational emotion, but underlying moral sentiments. These are often inarticulate and unarticulated even to ourselves. They can be like the “check engine” light on a car’s dashboard. It tells us something is amiss, but is unhappily unspecific about what that might be.

And but so, the point of revisiting this well-known thought experiment here is not to argue, debate or persuade. It’s not about taking sides but about watching ourselves respond so that we can try to get a better handle on what it is that does or does not trouble our conscience, a better sense of the alignment between head and heart. A gut-check.

This particular thought experiment is really just a variation of a trolley problem. Ethics professors, logicians, and philosophers love trolley problems, but that’s not where I first encountered them. I first encountered them thanks to evangelical preachers teaching us about penal substitutionary atonement — about Jesus dying in our place as a ransom for our sins. This was often presented as a kind of divine, cosmic trolley problem, with Jesus trapped on one set of tracks and the rest of us (or, at least, a handful of the elect) trapped on the other set, and God the Father there at the switch.

But this variation doesn’t involve tracks or trolleys or trains at all.

This one involves a fire in a fertility clinic.

OK, then. …

So there’s a fire in a fertility clinic. You run to the back to make sure everyone is out and you find the room engulfed in flames. You’ve got to go — now — before the ceiling collapses and escape becomes impossible. But as you turn to go, you see two things. There’s a young girl, about 6 or 7 years old, passed out on the floor. And there’s a small freezer unit, inside of which there’s a rack holding two dozen frozen embryos. You have just barely enough time, maybe, to carry one or the other out with you.

But only one. You can save the little girl, or you can save the 24 embryos.

Which do you choose to save?

Me too.

I say “Me too,” there, because I’m assuming you choose to save the little girl. Everybody does. That’s what our guts say, what our hearts say, what our conscience screams. That’s our moral intuition — what we feel would be right.

And to choose the other option — to leave the girl in order to “rescue” the 24 embryos — violates that moral intuition. It strikes us as wrong. As very wrong.

But that’s just the first level of what this little exercise can show us about what’s going on down there in our guts or hearts or souls or consciences or however we describe it.

Because if, like me, you were long taught and trained to affirm that human personhood begins at the moment of conception, and that a fertilized egg is morally indistinguishable from an infant, a toddler, a teenager or you, yourself, then this initial reaction — the one you just had, and felt, and knew with apparent clarity — is unacceptable. It’s what you feel, but it’s not something you’re allowed to feel.

And so that first response — that powerful and obvious and certain response to save the little girl — now seems like a trap. It seems like some devious, wicked invention formulated to trick you into feeling something you’re not supposed to feel. It seems like a trap intended to trick you into feeling something you’re not allowed to feel.

But, again, let me repeat: This is not a debate or an argument. I am not trying to change your mind, only to ask you to consider what was already there, already present. The point is not to trick you or to trap you into wanting to rescue this hypothetical little girl, but only to show that you — like me, like everyone else — already wanted that.

If this exercise makes you feel tricked or trapped, that’s not the consequence of anyone sneakily coercing you into feeling that rescuing the little girl is the right thing to do. That defensiveness arises, rather, from the sense that this feeling, this moral intuition, is not allowed.

If you do feel trapped, you may be tempted to start mapping out some clever evasion. Or you may switch tabs and start Googling for “rebuttals” of this famous scenario. You’ll find them — lots of them. Some involve some arcane, jesuitical arguments that go on for thousands of words. Others elude the point by deconstructing and reconfiguring the scenario as a magic trolley. Others just say you should stop talking to anyone who talks about such things. But all of them are frustratingly unsatisfying because they’re not addressing the thing that would cause you to look for such responses. They’re all focused on “Here is how you should counter this argument in a debate” rather than what you’re really searching for here. “Why do I feel like saving the little girl was the right thing to do? Why do I feel like leaving the girl and saving the 24 embryos instead would be monstrous?”

Because that’s what you do feel. We all do — which is why we almost never even bother considering that this thought experiment offers a third option. You could just turn and run, saving only yourself and fleeing the fire without either the girl or the embryos.

We don’t pay much attention to that possibility because we already know — universally, unanimously — that it isn’t an option at all. It would be cowardly, despicable, monstrous. The idea of emerging empty-handed from the building is almost unthinkable. How could you possibly justify yourself or defend yourself if you did that and had to somehow explain that decision to those outside?

But I’m not sure it’s any easier to imagine such an explanation if you emerged carrying the tray of embryos. No amount of reasserting the belief that these embryos are fully human persons would seem adequate at that point, even if the only people gathered outside were those who zealously shared that perspective. They might agree with the choice on some abstract level, doing their best to squelch the horror rising in their gut as they attempted to hail you as the hero who rescued 24 “people” from a burning building, rather than regarding you as someone who just left a little girl to die.

But no matter how many times they and you repeated that, you’d all still be feeling something else.

Maybe that feeling — that moral intuition, that pang of conscience — is just some emotional, sentimental response that a more sophisticated moral construct requires us to see past. Maybe that pang of conscience doesn’t mean anything.

Or maybe it means a great deal, whether or not it’s “allowed.”

Uncategorized

religious right

Satanic baby-killers

Previous Post

July 23, 2024

Recent reads (7.23.24)

Next Post

July 26, 2024 LBCF: Nero's fiddle

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

"Thank you for identifying Vlad as a Wallachian prince, not as a Transylvanian count"

CN Bacon

The purpose-driven labor priest

"The part I honestly don't understand about the "no throughline" argument is what is meant ..."

rrhersh

The purpose-driven labor priest

"I lost respect for the idea of Rick Warren as being a good one back ..."

rrhersh

The purpose-driven labor priest

"I've been having a discussion for a while now with various people, about the "decline ..."

Scurra

The purpose-driven labor priest

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category class warfare evangelicals Iraq Left Behind Mammon music Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What did the angel say at the tomb?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Go and sin no more. Be still and at peace. He is not here; He has risen! Fear not, for I bring news.