This surprisingly popular pro-choice challenge trades on the similarity between unborn humans
and tapeworms. Yep, you heard me right.
Tapeworms.
This is Red Pen Logic with Mr. B where we help you assess bad thinking by using good thinking.
And we like to have a bit of fun while we're doing it.
In today's tweet, K Hole Adventurer offers an analogy to show an inconsistency in the pro-life position.
K Hole Adventurer...what does that mean? Here's what he says, "If any of you pro-lifers get a tapeworm you better suck it up and be a
good host, because tapeworms have a heartbeat and feel pain. It deserves a choice and it chose you..."
"...to be its mother."
This tweet has over twenty thousand likes. Twenty thousand. Twenty thousand.
That means over twenty thousand people read this tweet and thought it actually made sense.
It's because they don't know the difference between an argument from analogy—good—and the
false analogy fallacy—bad. K Hole Adventurer uses an analogy to show the pro-life position is silly.
It's kind of like arguing for the rights of a tapeworm. Now, arguments from analogy are a special
kind of inductive argument. Basically, it reasons that because two things are similar, what's true
of the first is also true of the second. Of course, no analogy is perfect. There's always going to
be differences. But for an argument from analogy to work, the similarities have to be significant,
and the differences have to be superficial. But if the opposite is true—if the differences are
significant and the similarities are superficial— we have a problem. In K Hole's tweet, he points to
three explicit similarities between tapeworms and unborn humans. First, they have a heartbeat. Actually,
tapeworms don't have a heartbeat because they don't have a heart. Maybe he's thinking
of earthworms? Let's just overlook this for the moment. Second, they both feel pain. Third, they're
both inside a human being. So whatever is true of a tapeworm, the argument goes, is also true
of an unborn human being. If it's okay to kill the tapeworm that has a heartbeat, feels pain, and lives
inside the host, then it's also okay to kill the unborn human that has a heartbeat, feels pain, and
lives inside the mother. Are you still tracking with me? Here's the problem, and it's a big one.
This is a false analogy. The argument doesn't work because tapeworms and humans are very different. I
don't know if you've noticed. The similarities are superficial, but the difference it's a big deal, and
you already know what it is. It's the difference between the value of worms and the value of human
beings. I'm not going too quickly here, am I? Killing a worm is not the same thing as killing a human
being. The analogy breaks down because tapeworms are not intrinsically valuable. They're worms. No
one thinks parasites have the same value as people. Which is why, by the way, when you're backing your
car out of the driveway on a rainy day, you check for toddlers, not worms. Second, this analogy completely
misunderstands the pro-life argument. We are not saying that anything inside the body that has
a heartbeat and feels pain has therefore a right to life. We are not pro-life because something has
a heartbeat, or feels pain, or is inside your body. We're pro-life because abortion kills an innocent
human being inside the mother's body. Our argument is that human beings at any stage in development
are intrinsically valuable and therefore should not be killed. So it all comes down to one question:
What is the unborn? If the unborn is not human, like a tapeworm, then you don't even need a reason to
kill it. But if the unborn is human, then no reason is adequate. So this tweet relies on a faulty
analogy to show an inconsistency in the pro-life view. But there's nothing inconsistent about
pro-lifers being against killing human beings who are intrinsically valuable
and being for killing tapeworms because they're just, well, worms. Get it? So, what have we learned?
First, arguments from analogy can be a good way to argue, but the analogy has to be a good analogy. In
this case, there's a major difference. It's the difference between the value of worms
and the value of human beings. Second, this analogy completely misunderstands why we're pro-life. We're
not pro-life because something has a heartbeat, or something feels pain, or something is inside your
body. We're pro-life because abortion kills humans, and that's wrong. So here's the moral of the story:
Worms are worms. Humans are humans. And you need to know the difference. Class dismissed.