Trolleys and Abortion

I came across this little problem set, apparently some time ago, by the author Patrick S Tomlinson who claims that he has  knock-down argument for the doctrine that life begins at conception.

Let us just present what he says:

Whenever abortion comes up, I have a question I've been asking for ten years now of the "Life begins at Conception" crowd. In ten years, no one has EVER answered it honestly.
It's a simple scenario with two outcomes. No one ever wants to pick one, because the correct answer destroys their argument. And there IS a correct answer, which is why the pro-life crowd hates the question. Here it is.

You're in a fertility clinic. Why isn't important. The fire alarm goes off. You run for the exit. As you run down this hallway, you hear a child screaming from behind a door. You throw open the door and find a five-year-old child crying for help.

They're in one corner of the room. In the other corner, you spot a frozen container labeled "1000 Viable Human Embryos." The smoke is rising. You start to choke. You know you can grab one or the other, but not both before you succumb to smoke inhalation and die, saving no one. 

Do you A) save the child, or B) save the thousand embryos? There is no "C." "C" means you all die. 

In a decade of arguing with anti-abortion people about the definition of human life, I have never gotten a single straight A or B answer to this question. And I never will.
They will never answer honestly, because we all instinctively understand the right answer is "A." A human child is worth more than a thousand embryos. Or ten thousand. Or a million. Because they are not the same, not morally, not ethically, not biologically.

You can see where this has come from, because it is very similar to the challenge to the Utilitarian  viewpoint with the trolley problem.

There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person tied up on the side track. You have two options: 

Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five people on the main track. 

Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person.
Which is the most ethical choice?

This is practically equivalent to the problem:

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by putting something very heavy in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?

Yet clearly the systems are morally different. The first does not involve murder, the second does.
We recall that we do have St Thomas Aquinas and his principle of double effect: if an action has bad consequences inseparable from the desired good, it can obly be morally justified if

1) the nature of the act is itself good, or at least morally neutral;
2) the agent intends the good effect and does not intend the bad effect either as a means to the good or as an end in itself;
3) the good effect outweighs the bad effect in circumstances sufficiently grave to justify causing the bad effect and the agent exercises due diligence to minimize the harm.

Thus we see that in the first case, pulling the lever is morally justified: the nature of pulling a lever is morally neutral; one intends to save five lives and does not intend to end one other; five lives are saved at the cost of one. The second case is not morally justified: the act of killing an innocent man is murder.

Okay, so much for trolleys, what about the abortion problem? In saving either the child or the embryos, we are satisfying both 1) and 2) of the double effect, the question is really about the third. Which is better to save, one child or a thousand viable embryos?

The circumstances that we are given declare that we are under pressure of time (smoke inhalation, et c), so it is better to save the one who can definitely breathe and is thus least equipped to deal with the circumstances. Human embryos do not breathe, and thus it makes sense to save the child and entrust the embryos to God for preservation from the fire.

Notice, that just because embryos are not yet capable of breathing does not stop them from being human embryos. Those just about to be born do not breathe, save through their mothers. Of course, these embryos have been deprived of their natural environment in which they can continue their growth as human being do.

Of course, Mr Tomlinson wants us to save the child, and he wants us to save the child because he wants us to admit that an embryo is not really a human being. If one reads his situation carefully, we can see a lot of rhetoric being bandied about. It is Mr Tomlinson who says that there IS a right answer. Is there? How does he know it's right? He declares that this destroys our argument, but it doesn't. In fact it is his argument that is illogical. Consider what he says.

1) You can save a child or a thousand embryos.
2) You save the child.
3) Therefore you do not believe that embryos are human beings.

This only works with the assumption that you save one because you believe the other(s) is/are not human. That's not true at all! Replace the embryos with, say, two elderly people in wheelchairs with the condition that it is just as easy to save them as it is the child, but again you can either save the child or the elderly. Again, if one chooses the child, does that diminish the humanity of the elderly people? For a pro-lifer, as indeed anyone else, the problem is still the same. Tomlinson's argument does not follow.

But he demands an answer, and declares it a triumph when a pro-life person, such as myself, struggles to answer. Of course we struggle to answer: this is about people's lives! Unless we have to do it, then we would rather not think of these questions because we worry about how we can cope with the loss of people's lives. It is Tomlinson who, by demanding an answer, is diminishing the humanity of all the people involved.

So my answer is that I would save the child, but it is not because I believe that the embryos are not human. I would save the child, and then weep bitterly for the thousand people I could not save, imploring God for their souls and for the possibility of their safety. How's that for an answer, Mr Tomlinson?