A few years ago, a pro-choice science fiction author named Patrick S. Tomlinson challenged anti-choicers about their priorities when it came to protecting human life.

He set up a straightforward thought experiment in which one is asked to make a snap value judgment about the competing needs of a 5-year-old child and a box of embryos. On the one hand, you can protect the life of the child. Or, if you’re a “pro-life” warrior, you can protect the “lives” of a thousand unborn embryos.

The argument went viral.

Consider Tomlinson’s “simple scenario”:

For the nontweeters:

Here it is. You’re in a fertility clinic. Why isn’t important. The fire alarm goes off. You run for the exit. As you run down this hallway, you hear a child screaming from behind a door. You throw open the door and find a five-year-old child crying for help. 

They’re in one corner of the room. In the other corner, you spot a frozen container labeled “1000 Viable Human Embryos.” The smoke is rising. You start to choke. You know you can grab one or the other, but not both before you succumb to smoke inhalation and die, saving no one. 

Do you A) save the child, or B) save the thousand embryos? There is no “C.” “C” means you all die. In a decade of arguing with anti-abortion people about the definition of human life, I have never gotten a single straight A or B answer to this question. And I never will. 

Now, Tomlinson never set up a hypothetical pitting the well-being of a 13-year-old rape victim against the “child” of her grandfather-rapist, but Texas’ legislature and governor have already answered that question for us: The grandfather and the fetus win the day. 

Texas’ new abortion law, which Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law on May 19, bans all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, and it conspicuously fails to include an exception for rape or incest. And, unfortunately, the story of the grandfather’s embryo versus the 13-year-old girl isn’t a hypothetical. It’s all too real.

The girl was treated by Dr. Bhavik Kumar at the Planned Parenthood Center for Choice in Houston, but if Texas’ new law had been in effect when she sought her abortion, she would have been forced to travel even farther to terminate her pregnancy.

From Business Insider, via Yahoo! News:

The story of a 13-year-old girl remains salient. She’d been raped by her grandfather and told her mom when she stopped getting her periods. A doctor confirmed she was pregnant, but the girl couldn’t get an abortion close to home in Texas, where abortion access is already limited, so she was driven hours to Kumar’s clinic.

Having to travel hours to get an abortion is traumatic enough. Having to travel out of state? Clearly, that’s an even greater hardship. 

Well, that’s easy enough to answer. She’d have to give birth to her grandfather’s child. At the age of 13, she would have been forced to become the mother to a child, as well as its niece.

But, hey, as long as Abbott and his Embryo Crusaders are happy. 

According to Business Insider, Kumar also recently treated a 17-year-old who’d been drugged and raped at a party. In this case, the victim didn’t even know the offender. “They decided not to be pregnant,” Kumar told Business Insider. “They didn’t even make the decision to have sex. So this [law] would not give them any options; it would force them to carry that pregnancy.”

Is this really what Republicans want? Well, yeah, apparently. Because these are the unholy choices they’re forcing pregnant people to make.

That said, this could be a political overreach. For some reason, forcing 13-year-old girls to give birth to their rapists’ babies isn’t all that popular. Maybe it’s more popular in Texas, but nationwide it polls almost as poorly as Mitch McConnell. A 2018 Gallup poll found that 77% of Americans support first-trimester abortions in the case of rape or incest, and a slim majority (52%) support abortion rights in the third trimester in such cases. 

Of course, Tomlinson’s viral thought experiment put the lie to Republicans’ fretful insistence that embryos’ rights should be on par with those of a child. 

How many of these “pro-life” warriors would actually opt to save the (fully human, according to them) embryos and let the 5-year-old kid fry? The answer is likely zero—but then you never know with some of these maniacs.

But for some reason they’re perfectly comfortable with putting the needs of an embryo above those of a traumatized child—a child who would have been even further traumatized under this new law. But for Texas state Sen. Bryan Hughes, who sponsored the bill, the victims don’t even warrant mention, as demonstrated in an interview with CNN.

Then again, this shouldn’t be a surprise. Republicans have always put nonpeople ahead of people. Whether we’re talking about corporations or fetuses, you’re a second-class citizen if your needs conflict with theirs.  

This is what they do—but rarely do they look like such monsters while they’re doing it. We need to shine a light on their depravity as we protect reproductive rights—and make them pay.

It made comedian Sarah Silverman say “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT” and prompted author Stephen King to shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” (on Twitter, that is). What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Just $12.96 for the pack of 4! Or if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.