I’d like to think I’m a kind person. I go to church. I volunteer. I care about the community. But if I were presented with a choice to save a collection of human embryos over a middle-aged New York book publisher, I wouldn’t hesitate. I’d save the children, and apparently that makes me a bad person.
Eric Nelson, an executive at Broadside Books (which is part of HarperCollins Publishers) and a self-described “libertarian quaker,” outlined a hypothetical on Twitter Thursday morning. In it, he asserted that nobody actually believes unborn babies are real people and asked his followers whether they’d save toddlers over embryos.
“No human alive believes a fetus is a human,” Nelson wrote in a since-deleted post, following his claim with a ludicrous scenario to make his point. “If someone says they do, ask them this: A case with 25 frozen perfect embryos and a stroller with 3 toddlers are in a burning building. You have time to save one or the other. Which do you grab?”
Well, I certainly wouldn’t pee on this guy to put a fire out before saving the babies, or “embryos” as he called pre-born children in an effort to dehumanize them.
The fact is fetuses are human. Nelson can call them “embryos,” or “cells,” or “eggs,” or “tissues,” or “acorns,” or whatever else pro-abortionists call unborn children to write them off as unworthy of saving, but he can’t call human embryos another species.
If Nelson wanted to make pro-lifers out to be some kind of hypocrites using an extreme hypothetical, however, he should consider that he and everybody else who espouses pro-abortion views has already been born. What made their lives worth saving? Is it the difference in degree of sentience or the ability to rationalize? Because Nelson et al. are still a collection of cells, and Nelson’s Twitter post dispels any semblance that he’s a rational being.
Pro-abortionists follow a slippery slope any time they dehumanize human embryos as sub-species animal matter that can be discarded guilt-free. Not only do these activists contradict their own right to life, but they dismiss the trauma of millions of women who come to realize that their choice to “terminate a pregnancy” — another pro-abortion euphemism for killing preborn life — is really a choice to carry out executions on their own offspring.
A 2018 literature review from the National Library of Medicine found that “abortion is consistently associated with elevated rates of mental illness compared to women without a history of abortion.” Another analysis published in 2011 in the British Journal of Psychiatry found that “women who had undergone an abortion experienced an 81% increased risk of mental health problems, and nearly 10% of the incidence of mental health problems was shown to be attributable to abortion.”
In other words, most women who have had abortions quickly come to realize that it isn’t the same detached experience as tossing some animal carcass in the dumpster. Human embryos are by definition, human.
[RELATED: Therapist: Yes, Post-Abortive Women Suffer From ‘Trauma’ and ‘Complicated Grief’]
Nelson’s view of human embryos as disposable cells is part of a long tradition in American politics of claiming a certain class of people is not fully human and therefore that they can be discarded without hesitation. Had Nelson’s tweet been published in Antebellum America, it would have been popular among major plantation owners.
Considering that black babies are aborted at three times the rate of white babies, ending on-demand abortion is the civil rights movement of our time.