So if a person undergoes an operation where he is temporarily put in the flatlined state, were you to put a bullet in his brain during the operation, would you have violated that entity’s rights? Would any crime have been committed? Would it have been murder? If it troubles you, what would be the reason?
Interested in feedback from others in the “a fetus is not a person and has no rights by virtue of his mental state” crowd as well.
It’s this kind of argument-by-tortured-analogy that convinced me the whole issue of fetal personhood is a pointless distraction.
Bull. I’m a 37 year old mother, and I agree with him. Gushy parental feelings do not an argument make, and to suggest otherwise takes some gall, indeed.
Imagine you have a car and it breaks. You have a lot of investment in that car. Do you go to some relatively minor effort to fix it?
Now imagine someone has the pieces of a car lying about and asks if you want to invest considerable time and effort into making it a car and you say no.
See the difference?
How does one kill an unborn child, which in fact is what it is?
How is that a tortured analogy? It actually occurs. Today, in this very world we live in, people are occasionally–by accident or design–placed into a circumstance where their brain activity ceases, completely, then returns. Are they still “persons” or are they “blobs of tissue”?
And while it may be an irrelevancy to you, if that’s not on point for those who view some level of brain activity as the threshold for “personhood,” I don’t know what would be.
No. Talk about tortured analogies.
In both instances, there is a distinct, formed individual, albeit currently without certain brain functions. This individual has his own DNA and a singular unity of identity that will remain unbroken through every phase of his existence. He’s not a sperm cell or a tumor. He’s a human being, which is beyond argument. What some people want to decide is whether or not this human being is a person, if he has rights. The people I responded to are those who believe no rights can exist for someone without certain brain functions.
This issue, for you, is one of how much effort is involved? Really? Well, even if it is for you, that’s not the question I posed.
First, I believe that rights are legal constructs given by governments. Til then it’s just a wish. I honestly do not know if we have some legal precedent about what rights are accorded to dead bodies.
Second, no, he doesn’t have any rights at that time. He has ceased being a person. In my earlier answer I was attempting to point out that we don’t know if a fetus will develop into a functioning person, just like we don’t know that guy will be resucitated [sp?]. There’s no guarantee either will happen, and they’re not people until it does.
Third, yes it is getting tortuous. The second someone says no to your first highly unlikely scenario, you concoct an even more wildly unlikely scenario. There are laws against discharging a weapon in public, so if the guy shot a dead body on the operating table, he wouldn’t be charged with murder, he’d be charged with discharging his weapon. If I’m wrong, would some kind lawyer please correct me?
A fetus is not a person. A dead human is not a person anymore. Neither has rights.
Because the whole brain-activity argument is completely irrelevant, especially compared to the much more realistic and relevant situation of a person who has entered a home without the owner’s consent and whom the owner wants to expel. By making the argument about the fetus (or flatlining medical patient), you conveniently ignore the rights of the woman (or homeowner). A person who enters a home without the owner’s consent may very have a fully-functioning brain, an active consciousness, a well-developed personality, etc. This is no way reduces the homeowner’s right to demand the person leave, therefore the level of brain activity makes no difference.
And I regret that my fellow pro-choicers let themselves get drawn into such pointless debates.
I am not conveniently ignoring anything. I am responding specifically to other posters who, despite your blinding wisdom, have decided that there are other variables in this debate that worth discussion. As I said in prior posts, if you’re a member of the “it doesn’t matter anyway because it’s in the woman’s body” camp, you weren’t being addressed.
It is not pointless. If for you, it is axiomatic that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that can violate a woman’s right to “evict” the fetus, than why are you joining a debate that is trying to explore other facets of the argument, facets that apparently are irrelevancies for you? Others may see it differently, that this is a complex scenario with conflicting rights, or rights that may or may not exists until some gray boundary is crossed. It is an interesting debate.
Because I hope that fellow pro-choicers will realize the fetal-rights issue is pointless and require instead that the pro-lifers acknowledge the rights of the woman. Sure, it sucks that some people use their rights in ways we’re uncomfortable with, be it the production of porn or letting eight-year olds play with Uzis but it’s the inability to face or deal with a world where these rights are taken away that undercuts the pro-lifers.
Ignore the law, then. Does he have ethical basis for a right?
Feel free not to debate then, because I’m not outside the boundaries of the original ethical question–i.e., is this a person who has rights? Related questions (do such rights protect his life or not?) are not tangents, it’s the essence of this particular argument.
Ignore the law. Let me make sure I understand you. If someone were to kill the temporary flatliner, has something “wrong” occurred? Or would you shrug and say no, since this “dead guy” has no rights, nothing wrong has occurred? Seriously, it’s not a gotcha. I’m interested in the thought process that would consider such a thing OK, if in fact you do.
BTW, calling something tortured doesn’t make it so. I won’t go so far as to say that this retort is equivalent to “I don’t have a good answer for this,” but I will say I can’t see how this is not extremely analogous to some of the arguments made in this very thread. If that was not your position, feel free to ignore the question. But it’s a real occurrence, and I’m interested in how some people would reconcile their beliefs with such a circumstance.
And I hope that people can at least consider that when rights are in conflict, it’s at least interesting, and possibly enlightening, to debate how to resolve the conflict. Your position, which holds it as axiomatic that the question is answered at the start, does not allow for such discourse.
There is no debate if the unborn can’t possibly have rights–but even if he does, I realize there are those, like you, that wouldn’t consider that important. But if he does have rights, then there are others that would have to reconsider their positions. If the unborn have the right to live, someone could consider that the greater right. You don’t want to even discuss that, fine. Others might.
Well, call it whatever you wish, but the analogy (and feel free to not call it tortured) only works if the flatlining medical patient is hooked up to another person in a manner that requires the “donor” to supply blood transfusions or similar biological support. The presence or absence of brainwaves isn’t the issue: the imposition on another person is.
And I hope they recognize this for the red herring it is.
Dude, I’m beginning to think you are deliberately missing the point. The question–and clearly it is not a question for you–is directed to those who said that someone without certain brain function cannot be a “person.” Even if we establish that such an entity is a person, that does not mean that his rights must prevail. You are making that assumption in my argument. I am specifically responding to those in this thread who say any discussion of rights is not even possible with regard to someone without certain brain functions. It is that contention I’m addressing. You don’t want to play? Fine. Stop pissing all over the exchange for anyone else who might want to.
Honest to God, do you really believe that anyone who doesn’t believe exactly as you do shouldn’t even debate? That any position you don’t hold is a red herring?
Another problem is there obviously is a heated disagreement about abortion. Neither side gives ground. But why should the pro unwanted baby group get the right to force people to have kids they do not want? I understand that they do not believe and therefore they should not have one themselves . But saying I do not approve therefore you should not have an abortion is a huge step.
No. He’s dead. Ethics no longer apply. Ethics only apply to living people and their actions.
You tell me this is a deep ethical question, but that at the same time, I should ignore the law? Isn’t that a little inconsistent? The laws are based on our ethics.
How is your analogy apt? Precisely how many people have faced the decision of what to do with a man who breaks into an operating room and shoots a corpse vs. how many women/couples have had to make a decision whether or not to abort or have the baby? No, really. Just how realistic is this “extremely analogous” analogy? It has nothing to do with having no good answer for it. It’s just that the analogy is in and of itself so incredibly bad, I’m having trouble understanding why you side tracked the thread with it. As Bryan Ekers has said, it’s about a woman’s rights and the fact that forcing her to go through a pregnancy is, in effect, hijacking her body so you can feel good about a baby being born, regardless of the circumstance into which you force her. It’s a very overt form of slavery.
My point is that the point of the argument is misleading.
No, just that they should debate honestly. I’m not, in any case, stopping you from doing whatever you want.
Within the physical meat of their brains, a flatlined hypothermic still has all the programming of a person buried within them. To use a computer analogy, the program Blalron.Exe would still be on the harddrive and still be retrievable. A fetus is an empty harddrive with no programing in it.
I’m not sure whether you subscribe to the concept of a soul, but I view things from a purely materialistic perspective. Humans and other animals, at least mammals, share about 95% of the same DNA.
So what separates man from any other beast in the field? Our ability to truly reflect on our own existence. Humans are unique in being able to contemplate their own death. Most of us prefer to remain alive, so we’ve come up with a social contract to punish and deter humans from killing other humans
Animals feel pain, so I grant they have some interest in not having unnecessary pain inflicted upon them. Our laws recognize this to some extent. We have animal cruelty laws. However, there’s nothing illegal about a pet owner taking his perfectly healthy animal to the vet to have it painlessly euthanized, purely as a matter of convenience.
I see no objective reason to treat a human fetus any difference from any other biologically similar organism. Our sapience is what makes us special, and until a human reaches that level of development there’s no reason to give them any special rights.
But i’m not saying that the inability to prove a negative means we must accept the positive. I’m saying that you can phrase either side as a negative or positive claim.
Ah, but you see, here is where we agree! I don’t think there’s convincing evidence either. Nevertheless, in order to know that, we need to look and see. And we should not be happy with abortion as a practice until we have examined that evidence.
Yes, they do need to give evidence, but only to the extent that we do, too. For neither side can we assume, without looking at whatever evidence might be for the other side, that we are correct and that our position is the default. It is the job of the anti-choice movement to show that it is a person, and the job of the pro-choice movement to show that it is just some cells in an increasingly human shape.