When I was doing CCBR’s “Choice” Chain outside a high school, I spoke with a young girl who at one point exclaimed, “Yeah, but if you have a fetus in one hand and a baby in another, the baby comes first!”
Or does it? As she said that, like a bomb, an image went off in my mind–an image I saw on Facebook last year. As you can see, it shows a very small portion of the roof of an almost-submerged car. One of my friends is a paramedic, and last year he was called to that scene where a mother and her 10-month old baby were on top of the car as it was sinking.
He jumped into the cold water at midnight to save them.
Fast forward a year later, and I'm facing a teen who's essentially made a “stronger versus weaker—pick the stronger” argument, and when the image came to my mind, I knew I could use it to illustrate that she didn't really mean what she said.
So I told her the story and then I asked, “Who do you think the paramedic grabbed first to take to shore—the baby or the woman?”
The girl instantly replied, “The baby.”
“That's right,” I replied. “And what do you think would have happened if the paramedic picked the mom first and left the baby on the roof for when he swam back?”
I continued, wanting to paint a picture for her of a child precariously placed, alone, on the roof of a sinking car, inches away from rolling into death by drowning.
She responded, “The baby would have died.”
“So it seems,” I said, “that you believe that if someone is more needy, we help them first, not harm them. It sounds like you recognize that if someone needs more help, then we give them more help.”
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“You argue well,” the student said at the end of our conversation.
But all I did was ask questions and use analogies to bring to light beliefs she herself already had, namely that we help the weaker, giving them extra care precisely because they aren't strong.
And so, to go back to the student’s original comparison between the fetus on one hand and the baby on another—many others can care for the baby but only one can care for the fetus—thus heightening responsibility for the fetus, not lessening it.
Reprinted with permission from Unmasking Choice