More Pro-Choice Arguments that Need Refuting

Elena at My Domestic Church was kind enough to point me in the direction of this post at Third Wave Agenda regarding an old article in Reason and a post by Ampersand at Alas, a Blog. I've posted some comments at the Third Wave Agenda.

I wonder why Ronald Bailey at Reason is discussing human embryos again after Robert George and Patrick Lee took him behind the woodshed a couple of times 3 years ago and then did it again about a year and a half ago.

His line of reasoning this time is regarding the high percentage of embryos that fail to implant on their mother's uterine wall. He seems to argue that because prolifers don't spend time advocating to save these embryos (which he calls viable even though the same source he quotes says that these embryos have lethal chromosomal abnormalities) that therefore these embryos aren't persons. He even goes on to add this thought experiment:

A fire breaks out in a fertility clinic and you have a choice: You can save a three-year-old child or a Petri dish containing 10 seven-day old embryos. Which do you choose to rescue?

I posted my own scenario in the comments of Third Wave's blog.

Terrorists have kidnapped you and your spouse. They bring you into a room with a television screen where they have a live feed of other terrorists in India who are pointing guns at the heads of ten innocent people. The terrorists tell you that you have to choose who will die - your spouse or the 10 people from India. What do you choose? If you choose to save your spouse, does that somehow mean that the people from India weren't really "persons" or worthy of legal protection because you have a greater emotional attachment to your spouse?

How we feel about the embryos doesn't change what they are. Many people mourn the loss of pets more than they mourn the loss of thousands of human beings that die in foreign countries. Does this mean that cats are "people" while the thousands of foreigner aren't?

Bailey then goes to assert, Should we halt current human embryonic stem-cell research while these possible new avenues of research are being explored? Absolutely not. That would be surrendering to the moral bullying of a minority that wants to halt promising medical research that could cure millions on theological grounds that many of their fellow citizens do not share.

This is strange because when George and Lee gave him a whopping they never mentioned God or their religious beliefs - they proved that Bailey was wrong on logical and scientific grounds. I guess if you can't prove your opponents wrong you must sink to the level of asserting that what they believe is based on theological grounds.

Moral bullying? Morality! Oh no! We can't have that!