Abortion Thought Experiment

I have seen this thought experiment online as an argument for legal abortion:

You are in a burning building. You break open the door of a room. In one corner there is a baby crying. In the other there is a box labelled “one thousand viable frozen embryos.” You only have time to save one; or, even if there might be time to come back, you cannot carry both. Which do you grab?

The intuitively correct answer is that you grab the baby.

And this supposedly proves that nobody really thinks of embryos as human lives. They are not babies.

Here’s why the thought experiment is invalid.

I refer to a similar thought experiment in a classical Confucian text.

An emperor sees an ox being led to the slaughter in preparation for his royal banquet. Moved by compassion, he demands that the ox be released and not slaughtered.

Yet he proceeds to his banquet. Beef is served.

He is praised for his compassion, for his legitimate moral sentiments, which are indeed praiseworthy. But was the life of the pardoned ox really in any way more valuable than the life of the other ox which must have been slaughtered?

The seen ox is valued more than the unseen ox because seeing it evokes our natural compassion.

The same principle holds with the visible child as opposed to the embryos in the box. I expect the same choice would be intuitively made if, instead of embryos in boxes, it was a thousand children in Africa, who could be saved by watching the child within your vision die in agony. Most of us would choose the child we can see.