If the guy coming out of the coma requires someone else to be chained to the bed for 10 months, kicked in the gut, and cut open, etc, I’d say I’d let that person decide is she’s willing to do it.
It’s utterly appalling how you repeatedly describe carrying a pregnancy as “doing nothing”. Did you call your mother on mother’s day and say, “thanks mom for doing nothing to bring me on Earth. I’m sure you’re not regretting that minor inconvenience since I grew up to be such a caring and loving human being”.
Saying that people who support abortion rights support killing, is just as inflammatory as saying people who are against abortion rights support rape.
People against abortion want to insert something into a vagina (from the womb) against a woman’s will, so it’s probably as true as killing a mass of cells being the same thing as killing a baby. But neither has any place in GD, imho.
If there are laws against cutting down trees, the law doesn’t apply to an acorn.
If I burn down a forest, I haven’t burnt down a house, no matter how serious you were about building a log cabin out of those trees.
You’re welcome to your opinion, but since your position is that the rights of a sentient human have to take a back seat to a potential one, you certainly shouldn’t get to make rules that effect other people.
I certainly agree with everything else you said, but here, with great sadness, I’m going to quibble, just a bit.
Yes, our correspondent does have the right to make the rules. He gets to vote for whatever candidate for Congress he wants, and for whatever President he wants, knowing the kind of Supreme Court Justices that President will appoint. He gets to vote for whatever Senators he wants, to confirm those Supreme Court nominees.
If the pro-life side can accomplish this, and overturn Roe v. Wade, then…they win. Our rights are never so strongly protected that they can’t be taken away – entirely legally.
He does get to make the rules…and so do we. The important thing is for us to continue to fight at least as hard as he does, and to prevent civil rights gains from being taken away again.
We recently lost the enforcement provisions of the Civil Rights Act; within days, states acted to restrict voting rights. Abortion rights, right now, seem to hang on a one-person majority in the Supreme Court.
Our democracy is a rickety, shaky, tenuous, tremulous, unstable platform…and there are people out there, kicking at the uprights as vigorously as they can.
Hell of a way to run a railroad… But, as the fellow said, “If you know a better hole, go to it.”
The sentience, consciousness and awareness is produced by a working brain. Assuming his brain works again, he’ll be back among us.
I don’t support killing sleeping people either.
I think a better way to phrase it, is being a person involves the capacity for a conscious mind. If you’re drugged, or KO’ed you’re still a person, you’ve just been put into sleep mode.
And assuming the baby’s brain works in the future, the baby will be among us. But right now (according to you) it doesn’t work, so the baby is not “among us”. And neither is the guy in the coma. So why is killing him wrong again?
Current capacity? If so, the guy in the coma demonstrably doesn’t have it. Neither does the fetus. So why is killing one wrong but killing the other isn’t?
My definition of “virtually identical” means that apart from its size, a baby at five month’s gestation is little different from a baby at full term. I’ve posted links to this baby at least twice but since you seem to have missed it I thought I’d post it again.
Note that she’s a fully formed baby, with bones, joints, skin that wrinkles when her joints are articulated, etc. Note that she’s sleeping and breathing through her lungs thanks to a tiny oxygen mask, both of which indicate the presence of a developed and functioning brain.
She is a child by any rational, non-political definition, and is most decidedly not an embryo, zygote or “shapeless mass of tissue”.
First, the straight-up comparison is, itself, fallacious, and everyone here knows that. The guy who is unconscious is still fully-formed and operationally whole. The fetus is not viable, not viable, not functional. It doesn’t have the parts necessary for consciousness. The man does.
Second: the unconscious guy doesn’t require the life-support given by an unwilling woman, nurturing him inside her body.
So, then, to be clear, the requirement of “sentience, consciousness, awareness or intelligence” to be a “person” was just a red herring, right? Glad to see we resolved that. Hope no one brings it up as an argument in the future.
The guy who is in a coma, whether fully formed or not, is not capable of sentience, awareness of consciousness. He is a “clump of cells”. His “personhood” is only potential. The same with the fetus.
As for your second one - the life-support by the woman already exists. It is not to be given in the future. It is there already. When you take it away, you kill. See my analogy about kicking the guy out of your house into a snowstorm, with 100% chance of killing him. Manslaughter at least, and could be second degree murder.
Yes…but you’re the one who dragged it across the tracks. You indulged in a childish display of Socratic pseudo-naivete, pretending that you didn’t know what everyone here knows from experience: a fetus is qualitatively different from a man in a coma. You drew a false equivalence, contrary to everyone’s understanding of reality.
Right. Settled and done with. No one would, in good faith, bring it up again. All done with, and settled…
Eh? What’s this? “Hope no one brings it up as an argument in the future” and then in the very next sentence…you bring it up. So much for good faith.
See other people’s analogies about waking up with someone hooked up to you and dependent on you for life support.
If the guy is hooked up to my body, then, yes, I have the right to kick him out into the snowstorm. As always, your analogies are not convincing, because there is no possible situation that is meaningfully analogous to an unwanted pregnancy.
You really don’t get it, do you? We don’t happen to agree with you.
