A Thought Experiment to Help Understand the Pro-Life Position

Francis Beckwith, author of the outstanding book, Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice (Oxford University Press, 2007), offers a thought experiment in a recent interview:

Imagine that an abortion-choice scientist wants to harvest human organs without harming human beings that are persons.

In order to accomplish this, he first brings several embryos into being through in vitro fertilization.

He then implants them in artificial wombs, and while they develop, he obstructs their neural tubes so that they may never acquire higher brain functions, and thus they cannot become what the typical prochoice advocate considers “persons.”

Suppose, upon hearing of this scientist’s grisly undertaking, a group of pro-life radicals breaks into his laboratory and transports all the artificial wombs (with all the embryos intact) to another laboratory located in the basement of the Vatican.

While there, several pro-life scientists inject the embryos with a drug that heals their neural tubes and allows for their brains to develop normally.

After nine months, the former fetuses, now infants, are adopted by loving families.

If you think what the pro-life scientists did was not only good but an act that justice requires, it seems that you must believe that embryos are beings of a personal nature ordered toward certain perfections which it is wrong to obstruct.

This is why pro-life advocates would say that human embryos are not potential persons, but rather, that they are persons with potential.