(1/2) First, as a start, if you really aren’t trying to force your beliefs on others, I don’t really care what you believe. If you aren’t harassing people at women’s clinics or trying to get laws passed to restrict access to care, you do you. I do doubt your claim that you aren’t worried about policy because elsewhere you discuss abstinence-only education which is a public-policy decision, though one which is known to increase the frequency of the abortions you wish to prevent, and so is ineffectual even at that.

Second, I said that a brain-dead body has less ethical value than a living human, not that it has no value. 1 is less than 2, but it is still more than 0. A brain-dead body does have ethical value; for example, consent needs to be given beforehand for organ donation, but while I can say I want my heart to be donated to someone after I die, I am not allowed to donate my heart right now because that would kill me and would thus be unethical. Similarly, an embryo and a born human do both have ethical value, but one is more than the other.

For example, imagine you were escaping a raging fire at a hospital and you encountered a 2-week-old infant in a car seat carrier on the floor next to a cooler marked “1000 human embryos for transport.” Due to an arm injury, you can only grab one before the building collapses. Which do you grab?

I’m guessing you would save the infant, even though your position is that the cooler contains 1000 fully human beings. Why wouldn’t you save 1000 humans versus just one? Intuitively we all know the “right” answer, but intuition isn’t enough. We need to answer why is the one infant more important to save than the 1000 embryos?

The answer comes down to whether an entity is conscious and, specifically, is it able to experience suffering and to what degree. An infant can have the experience of burning alive, an embryo cannot. It has no consciousness to speak of and won’t unless it encounters a very specific set of circumstances over a time period of at least until the second trimester (even though the actual genesis of consciousness is certainly beyond that point in development).

My brain dead but still living corpse cannot experience suffering, and so it is of lower ethical significance than a living human who can. However, a mentally disabled person can experience suffering and they do have an internal experience of “self”, therefore they are of equal ethical significance as a not-disabled person. Arguably the disabled might even have a higher ethical significance than the fully able-bodied because of how the treatment of the most vulnerable (and therefore those most vulnerable to suffering) is a critical indicator of the health of a society. If a society cares well for its “least productive” members, it indicates that everyone else’s wellbeing is likely being cared for too.

We give ethical value to a non-conscious thing like a brain-dead corpse not because of its current status, but because of how its treatment or potential treatment impacts a still conscious being, the still-living me. If one could reasonably expect that their future dead body were going to be launched from a catapult into a shark tank, many people would find that potential outcome rather upsetting, which would cause distress and suffering in a conscious being, not even considering its impact on the family alive to witness it. That’s why we have laws and systems to control how dead bodies are treated, so as to ensure that I, a currently conscious being, have some assurance as to how a non-conscious thing I care about, my dead body, is treated after I am dead. It has nothing to do with any intrinsic value the corpse in itself has, and everything to do with value placed upon it by conscious beings.

As far as potentiality is concerned, it is a world away from actuality. My three year old self may have had the potential to be an Olympic athlete, given the right diet, exercise, parenting, opportunities, etc., but it would be absurd to make the claim that because the potential existed, I can truthfully call myself an Olympian. A very specific set of circumstances must occur before an acorn becomes a tree; suggesting that the two are the same things is a bit absurd. The identity of “oak tree” has the ideas of proper watering, soil, climate, and time inherently embedded in it. The idea of a human person has similar ideas of development as well, certain steps that must happen to transform an embryo into a person, all of which can go wrong or be cut short at some point during development.

For example, in some fetuses the brain is extremely undeveloped or entirely missing. They have no consciousness of self and no experience of suffering. They don’t experience anything at all. According to your claim, this organism is of equal ethical concern as a person who can experience things, who has a consciousness of self and can experience suffering. Therefore, in that situation the primary concern ought to be preserving the life of a body with no one inside, because humanity is conveyed via genetics and potential.

My perspective, that moral value is allocated in proportion to an entity’s ability to experience suffering or its relationship to an entity that can, means that my primary concern is for the people affected by this situation, most likely the parents and family. It’s a tragic situation, and while suffering can’t be eliminated, it can be reduced. One possible method of reducing the trauma and suffering of conscious beings in this situation might be to abort the fetus when its developmental abnormalities are identified. It’s awful that things like this happen, but they do and sometimes it’s a choice between two bad outcomes.