Simply: if there was a situation where there was an older child and two babies who might die, would it be right to kill one or both of the babies to save the older child? Why?
That would depend on a lot of factors that a simple scenario can't easily capture.
It's one of the sorts of questions I pose during character creation for a table top role-playing game to get players thinking a bit about where their characters stand on the "back to the wall" issues.
e.g.
So, a lunatic has a gun to your head and you have to make a choice; flip the switch to the right and your best friend dies; flip it to the left and ten people you don't know die. What do you choose? What if it were a thousand people? A million?
The value judgement can sometimes be identical and sometimes vary according to the enormity of the problem. Some are happy with the 1:10 trade because "it's their best friend" but when the numbers become many magnitudes larger then there seems to be an intrusion of social responsibility.
To my mind, this is one of those debates where there is a discussion to be had at the individuals level (i.e. you, me, some other gal we know) and another to be had at the community level (i.e. the UK, or Western Europe, or the entire world) and the answers differ depending on what level you have the discussion at. What works for you and me doesn't necessarily work when we apply it to people we don't know and perhaps don't trust.
At an individual level, I'm firmly pro-choice. Were I a woman and pregnant, through any vector, I want the choice to carry that foetus to term or to abort the pregnancy. Similarly, if faced with a threat that leads me to believe life or limb are in danger I reserve the right to intervene with force, up to and including deadly force.
At a community or population level, I'm less comfortable with that position because of the potential for abuse by people I do not know and thus do not trust (working on the principle that trust is earned not given as a default). Thus, I'd not be comfortable with my approach to the use of deadly force being applied widely, for example.
It seems to me that there's no one answer to cover all situations, though some principles could probably be drummed up to be applicable to many situations. Note: principles not rules, as I'd be looking for guidance (i.e. consider trying this or that) as opposed to legislative constraint (i.e. you must not do this and you must do that).
In this case, I believe that the most correct action was to save the life of the child at the expense of the nascent lives of the foetuses, purely through a practical application of triage: better to save one and lose two than lose all three. That would be an application of a principle "save as many as you can". Of course, it's a game of probability where game is not used to make trivial but simply to raise awareness of the lottery that all such decisions are made within. The girl would probably have died trying to give birth, if not before. The babies would probably have died during birth. Of course, there may have been the tiniest chance that all would have survived and lived happily ever after. I wonder what the actual chances of that last happy ending were really? Vanishingly small, I expect.
We're all playing with fire constantly, whether we realise it or not. Walking down the street is a calculated (low) risk. Having a baby is another risk (more dangerous than the street? not sure...). I think we probably just try to make the best of what we can in the lottery of "what'll happen next?" Grandstanding about it afterwards just seems such a waste of time and effort.
