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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Dietrich who wrote (506140)	12/9/2003 1:17:44 PM
From: Johannes Pilch	Respond to of 769670

It's true that a fetus will often develop into a sentient human being and a brain dead adult will rarely become sentient again (though we can't say with absolute certainty what state of consciousness such a person has), is the morality of this reduced to playing the odds then? Likely sentient human = murder and unlikely sentient human = no murder? That sounds like moral relativism to me. Not at all. I mentioned the nature of the brain dead person to show that his natural destiny is one that typically places him closer to death than the developing fetus. Of course all humans naturally progress toward death, but there is no natural obligation to "plug-in" a human such that he is hindered from this progression. When you begin your approach here with a brain dead person who is "plugged in," you are accidentally assuming that being thusly plugged in is an identification of all humans. It is not. Contrariwise, to be "plugged-in" to one's "mother," as is the case with the human conceptus, is to be human by definition. All humans, by virtue of being humans are naturally "plugged-in." Should we therefore unplug the human in this case, we quite literally act contrary to what a human is. And the pro-abortion argument says that a woman has no obligation to provide life-support to the developing fetus. That argument is objectively against human identity for the reason I mentioned above. Now we will get in to your arbitrary definitions of what is natural. Isn't it part of our nature to care for the ill and wounded? On what basis? There is absolutely nothing arbitrary about my definition. I think technology may well render this debate moot. I expect that soon a woman's body won't be needed for the development of a fetus and this debate instead of being settled will become moot. I think not. Consider the case of a mother who decides to clone herself. A cell is taken from her and activated such that it becomes a self-expressing human entity. It is plugged-in to a machine that allows it to gather resources for its continued expression. Then the mother later decides she does not wish to care for a replica of herself, that she does not even wish one in the world. You see, unless we come face-to-face with what we are in nature, the abortion debate will rage ever onward.