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| I read Your Q/A: "I've heard that WELS can accept abortion in order to save the mother's life. Could you also support,for example, the killing of an innocent person in order to have an organ transplant, such as some utilitarian philosophers have proposed? In both cases one is killing one human being in order to save another, what would be the difference?" What if You could save either the mother or the child, would it be considered murder to have an kill the child in order to save the mother4s life? If not, I don't see the difference between the situations.
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| The two situations you mention are quite different. In the case of allowing an abortion to save the mother's life, the purpose is to save whatever life can be saved. If one would allow the pregnancy to continue, the danger is that both mother and child would die (e.g., ectopic pregnancy). Thus one saves the life of the mother. Unfortunately the same procedure that saves her life also takes the life of the unborn child.
We might note that sometimes the mother may choose to endanger and sacrifice her life to save the life of her child. I know about cases where the mother refused treatment for cancer because it would have ended the life of her child. By the time she delivered the child, the cancer had spread beyond hope. So in the first case you mention, both lives are threatened. One will have to decide which life can or should be saved.
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