A trolley is out of control, barreling toward 6 unaware adult strangers, including 2 parents with children at home. The only person who recognizes the impeding tragedy is you. Fortunately, the lever for a switch is within reach.

Scenario #1: If you pull the lever, you'll divert the trolley toward a 6-month-old infant in a carriage, killing it instantly. Do you hesitate such that you risk missing the opportunity to save the 6 people?

Scenario #2: If you pull the lever, you'll divert the trolley to a 9-week-old, 1-inch long fetus in a petri dish (being transported and kept viable outside the womb due to new science). Do you hesitate such that you risk missing the opportunity to save the 6 people?

If you answered yes to #2, you're either delusional or a morally troubled person. The modern anti-abortion movement requires adopting a disgusting equivocation. Sane, honest people can value fetal life without equivocating it to an actual child.

Granted, the trolley problem has many flaws. There are many ways to legitimately weasel out of answering the question, but I think it fairly exhibits the senseless equivocation people make in the debate.

Appropos to how someone would answer #2, your insults and denigration of someone who would disagree with you are utterly repugnant and repulsive.

I'm unashamed to say that allowing (even hypothetically) 6, innocent, conscious human beings to die for the sake of an _idea_ (that is, that a fetus is equivalent to a born human child) is gross. Allowing ideas to dismiss one's obligation to respect individuals' humanity and to life is indefensible; and any view that equivocates such a nascent fetal life to that of a born human is indisputably and fundamentally a philosophical, if not religious, proposition. Using such a proposition to excuse death is anathema to civilized society and everything humanity has painfully learned in the past two centuries.

The same logic that permits one to claim a fetal life is equivalent to a born human (or, especially, a conscious human) is the same logic that permits one to claim that Jews are subhuman. Both cases discard the necessity for any objective standard (whatever that standard is, and whether it's definite and knowable in all cases).

In as much as I impugned the poster's personal character, I apologize. I'll leave my posting unedited as it's a fair criticism, and editing it would be self-serving. I endeavour to criticize specific behavior and opinions, not individuals. My post was sloppy and wrong in that regard.

The original comment above contained no dilemma. There was no choice between saving the mother and the foetus. The mother was already dead. Stand down; you're batting at a straw man.

In both scenario, the optimal solution is to freeze.

It's the easiest option to defend in front of an audience and it will leave no witnesses in any of these scenarios ;)

This isn't a healthy mindset for anyone in the healthcare industry.

Failing to resuscitate someone is not the equivalent of killing them in my mind.

Whatever your philosophical or spiritual leanings are the biological and medical definition of "child" does not include fetuses.

That depends upon which definition of "child" you are going with. Some are broad enough to describe any offspring (from fetus to adult).