“If you caused a car crash, should you be forced to donate blood?”
[This article is a transcript of “If you caused a car crash, should you be forced to donate blood?” courtesy of volunteer Ben Tomlin. If you’re interested in volunteering to transcribe more of our content, please complete our volunteer survey.]
Video also available on TikTok.
“If you were driving a friend with your car and you caused a car crash, should you be forced to donate blood to that person?” No, you shouldn’t.
First of all, there are a bunch of other people who could help that person besides you. We have an entire infrastructure of blood banks for exactly this reason. There’s no equivalent to that in pregnancy.
Second of all, the experience of getting hit by a car and dying in need of a blood transfusion isn’t some ubiquitous universal life-stage experience that we’ve all had to go through at some point, and at some point in the past you were the one who was hit by a car and someone donated blood to save you, and now you feel indebted for the fact that you get to be alive, and you’re trying to help other people be alive who are going through the same inevitable phase. It’s nothing like that.
But third, and most importantly, if you refuse to donate blood to someone, you aren’t killing them, you’re just refusing to save them. There’s no refusal-to-save option with abortion. With abortion, you take some kind of action that does kill the embryo or fetus, either by depriving them of their only source of oxygen, or dismembering them, or injecting poison into their hearts, or something like that, but they’re all methods of actively killing.
So in the car crash analogy, if getting crashed into by a car and needing a blood transfusion to live was just something every single person has to go through, and if in fact there was nobody else that could offer blood to this person to let them survive, and you knew in advance that, if you crashed your car into them, you would be the only person in the world that could offer them blood to help them survive, and if the only alternative to not offering them blood was actively killing them, in that case, yeah, I might say “Yeah, you have to donate blood,” but that has nothing to do with regular car crashes because they’re not analogous to pregnancy and abortion.
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