When pregnancy endangers the life of the mother, a moral crisis occurs because the lives of two people are at risk (by “life of the mother” we do not merely mean she will be inconvenienced but that her very life is threatened). The goal should be to save the lives of both mother and child, as the pro-life ethic has always been to save as many lives as possible. If the life of the mother is endangered after fetal viability¹, when the baby can survive outside the mother’s body with the help of current technology, then the solution is to try to save both lives by inducing labor or performing an emergency C-section. However, if the mother’s life is endangered before fetal viability, then the child will die if the mother dies. Ectopic pregnancies are the most common example of this, wherein the embryo implants someplace other than in the uterus—usually in the fallopian tube. When the tube ruptures, the baby dies and the mother could hemorrhage and die as well. In this case, we should save the mother’s life, but by means other than abortion, since that is the intentional killing of a preborn child. In the case of an ectopic pregnancy, a physician would perform a salpingectomy to remove the part of the fallopian tube in which the child has implanted, thereby saving the mother’s life. The embryo will die as a result of this procedure, but the intention is to save a life—not take one. In other words, the baby’s death is foreseen, but it is not intended. The only reason she dies is because we currently lack technology to keep her living once we remove her from the environment in which she cannot survive. This moral crisis would be like carrying one person out of a burning building and then looking back, seeing other people who are about to die. You foresee that they will die, but it is the fire, not you, causing their deaths. You are not guilty of their loss. Rather, your duty is to save as many lives as you can—even if it is just one person.   1. It should be noted that the age of viability changes with advances in medical technology and also varies with geographical access to current technology. If it were medically possible to keep the youngest of preborn humans alive outside the womb, this question would lose its relevance as there would be this obvious solution.