Well, I believe there are some people who pursue a “consistent life ethic” – against abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment (don’t know where they stand on war).
Prominent pro-capital punishment politicians are not often threatened with excommunication.
First, a question: are those politicians Catholics? Because if they aren’t, the Catholic church doesn’t have a say in their church membership
Second: these days excommunication is pretty rare for anyone.
Yes. The point is that there is much more energy and effort put into “fighting” abortion than there ever has been for stopping executions. Especially if they are both “murder.”
Or wars.
Or the reliable destruction of fetuses at fertility clinics. Test tube babies get their souls long after conception, don’tcha know?
There actually are people opposed to the destruction of fertility clinic fetuses and try to adopt them so they can be born and raised. Again, points for consistency of a sort, in that they’re willing to raise the kids even after they’re born.
I had considered this. Can this kind of free-will pro-life be consistent with involuntary euthanasia, for example the euthanasia of a patient in vegetative state who has not expressed a preference to live or die?
~Max
I would bet there is massive overlap between people that are anti-abortion and anti-euthanasia. There is probably significantly less overlap between people that are anti-abortion and anti-death penalty.
That should read non-voluntary.
~Max
I would say that a case could be made to allow another person to decide on behalf of this person. It’s not as strong as the free will decision, but not unprecedented. The ‘she/he would want it this way’ and perhaps execution of a living will are some examples of honoring a presumed free will decision.
Going beyond that, lets say the state takes control and makes a decision or as a matter of law, if x criteria is met then we do this, I think we are very far away from the sanctity of individual life, and down another road to a communal approach to this issue.
In the case of ‘a patient in vegetative state who has not expressed a preference to live or die?’, if there was no one who came forth knowing that, I don’t think a case could be made for the sanctity of individual life (pro life?), and fall under the above, it could be done a a function of the community, but I do feel it does chip away at a pro life stance in this respect.
The term “Pro-Life” has been entirely taken over by the anti-abortion movement. This movement doesn’t care about anything but banning abortion and eliminating reproductive freedom. (It certainly doesn’t care about ensuring that the babies produced are well taken care of.) The people who are pro-life might independently also oppose euthanasia (and also youth in asia), but that has nothing to do with their Pro-Life position.
As a pro-life person I do not suppoprt state-mandate euthanasia or any such form in which someone else decides clearly to kill a person.
Orthothasia, for instance, pain killers that may accelerate a certain death but alleviate pain are acceptble, avoiding heroic measures like, say, “50 units of blood every day” are also acceptable, and, ruining your family and becoming destitute just to keep grandma plugged is not necessary.
I am against the death penalty, but it is not completely against the whole idea the the basic pro-life stance “don’t kill innocents”, rather than the excecution of guilty people.
(I’m going to avoid discussing the “real” meaning of pro-life here. I take it for its common meaning of “against abortion.”)
I’d say it depends on the reason for euthanasia.
In one sense you could call the Pro-Life (or Anti-abortion) movement a cry for age equality: that very young humans should also have rights. If you continue along that line of reasoning the very old should too. If someone was anti-abortion but supported euthanasia for the elderly I’d call it an inconsistency.
Voluntary euthanasia to alleviate suffering would be a different issue IMO.
That’s interesting to me, because I would not expect someone who is against abortion on the basis of innocence to support a deliberate overdose of pain-killers, in response to a terminal disease, if that’s what you meant to imply with “pain killers that may accelerate a certain death but alleviate pain”. I could have misread you there, since the word orthothanasia seems inappropriate for that kind of arrangement. The reason being, as I see it, the person with a terminal disease is probably not responsible for that disease, just like the person developing in the womb is not responsible for their mother’s pregnant state.
I wonder how you approach this example. You say it is acceptable to avoid heroic measures. Suppose a person, a young child or infant even, perhaps unborn, will survive without requiring heroic measures. Prognosis may be five or ten years with special attention to their condition, maybe longer by miracle. But they will live only under great pain and constant suffering. The doctors can administer a drug which will temporarily stop the pain, but at young ages, it will probably kill them too.
~Max
The Catholic position, at least, is something called the “principle of the dual effect”. Alleviating pain is a good effect. Killing a person is a bad effect. If someone is dying and in pain, then it is acceptable to give them opiates to alleviate their pain. If they are in a great deal of pain, then it might require a very large dosage of opiates to alleviate their pain. Large doses of opiates like that carry a risk of shortening life, but that’s acceptable, if the purpose of the large doses is pain relief, and if there’s no other way to provide that pain relief that doesn’t carry the risk of death. On the other hand, if one provides that same large dose of opiates, but with the intention of causing death, then that is unacceptable.
Similarly, you might have, for example, a pregnant woman with cancer. Many cancer treatments would be dangerous for the fetus. It is still acceptable for that woman to pursue cancer treatment that’s dangerous to the fetus, if the purpose is to fight the cancer, and if there’s not any other treatment that would fight the cancer as well with less risk to the fetus. But it’s not acceptable for her to have a deliberate abortion.
Of course, it’s also acceptable for the terminal patient to choose to forgo the painkillers, or for the pregnant woman to choose to delay cancer treatment until after she gives birth.
Are you picturing a Logan’s Run scenario?
Regardless, there’s nothing about that that’s incompatible with being anti-abortion until you confirm that the reasoning behind the anti-abortion stance is based in a desire to avoid taking an innocent human life regardless of that life’s age. I can think of at least two reasons to be anti-abortion that wouldn’t be bothered with offing a person of retirement age, particularly if they weren’t actively objecting.
I’m not sure I understand what you are saying. To my knowledge, properly titrated opiates in palliative care don’t carry a significant risk of respiratory failure[1]. The dose is never supposed to be lethal. When dealing with newborns maybe, which is why we put them on ventilators in the NICU. For everyone else, either it’s an overdose or just really really bad luck and a host of comorbidities.
ETA: [1] Sykes N, Thorns A. The use of opioids and sedatives at the end of life. Lancet Oncol. 2003 May;4(5):312-8. Redirecting
~Max
I’ll have to take a ride around the half-dozen or so fertility clinics in town while out and about. I’ll put the over/under on any protesters, let alone those carrying disgusting posters, screaming at people, or dressing up as a fake nurse to turn women around and scream at them at three.
I’ll guarantee I see zero, because while there may be a few, they are so drastically outnumbered by those that daily harass innocent women (many who aren’t even getting an abortion, just basic sexual health care) as to be inconsequential to any realistic discussion.
If ‘pro-life’ people were really against taking innocent lives, they’d be major supporters of the BLM movement since the entire point of BLM is that police should not be allowed to kill people, especially minorities. But I’ve never seen any of those raging protesters that you see around an abortion clinic screaming at people at BLM protests, they seem to stick to anit-abortion and I’ve in fact never met one who’s willing to, say, wear a BLM hat to their protest to show their solidarity with not taking innocent lives. It’s also telling that they never protest at fertility clinics, which destroy far more fertilized embryos than abortion clinics - if it was really the case that life begins at conception, those clinics aimed at rich people would get the brunt of their attention.
While the pro-life rhetoric is all about how caring and kind they are, the actual facts of what they support and especially the people they put into office demonstrate that they are not in favor of preserving life at all, but are instead interested in controlling women’s bodies. They don’t care about police killing innocent people, measures to contain COVID, the lives of immigrants and asylum seekers, and other, similar things, they just care about banning abortion for poor people.