I understand your points and I think you understand mine.
If you consider a fetus or an embryo a person and can persuade yourself that the Constitution thinks so, too, then protecting the safety of that entity would meet the standard and be appropriate. In the case of the embryo, I find that notion preposterous. Granting a fetus some consideration short of the legal rights of a person, OTOH, seems appropriate to me. But for the complexity and difficulty of creating a set of laws to effectively deal with that. If the government cannot successfully deal with tax law or welfare programs without making a big mess, I don't know how it can deal with something as subtle as the entitlements of a pre-person at various stages. If you think it can, you are either extremely sentimental about the matter or you have more confidence in government than I do.
There is a difference between ceaseing extraodinary attempts to save a life on one hand and taking a life on the other.
I hope that you are not proposing that extraordinary efforts must be made for a fetus when extraordinary efforts would not be made for a baby or an adult. Hopeless is hopeless. It is not necessary to try everything before giving up, especially when there is suffering involved. With the tools now available, an assessment of hopeless can be made prior to birth. If that were the case, then withdrawing life support at that point seems the appropriate thing to do.
This is an example of what I mean when I talk about government screwing things up. We could end up with a law that says we must continue life support for a fetus when we would not do so for a baby. What a mess that would be.
I am not especially knowledgeable about the practices of hospital ethics committees, only what I see dramatized on TV or in movies. It would seem, though, that some ethical construct like that would be more sensible than a law flat out banning abortions or trying to anticipate all the possibilities. Less formal approaches are better at handling subtlety. |
