My definition is having the right to choose. Something reserved for conscious people. While conscious, Zoe chose to let her husband make choices for her should she be unable to do so.
Very staunch pro-lifer here. Another vote for the no-brainer category. Either Mom AND baby die, or just the baby dies. Save the mom, duh! If she gets pissed – oh well.
I didn’t say I agreed with her choice – just that it’s her’s to make. Note – it would not be mine.
In this particular scenario, I’m getting that the fetus is going to die no matter what, so if I were Washington, I’d probably authorize an abortion. HOWEVER, if the pregnancy were viable, I would hope he’d respect her wishes.
Without question: Pro-Life.
Zoe’s.
I am in agreement with the majority here. If the fetus is not viable, choosing to not abort and die is equivalent to suicide with no upside. Unlike some others here, I believe that suicide is a valid choice to make in some circumstances, but Zoe has not made that choice. She has stated clearly that in a choice between her own life and that of an unborn child’s, she’ll choose the child’s. That’s fine, but it’s not the situation here. Her baby is dead either way. So, for me, there wouldn’t be the slightest hesitation; no benefit is to be derived by not aborting the pregnancy. There’s no moral question here as far as I’m concerned - no more than if Zoe’s life depended on having an appendectomy. The fetus is organic tissue, but its capacity for independent life is gone before they arrive at the hospital.
A much more difficult question is what to do if the fetus is viable. First and foremost is the issue that people do change their minds and act contrary to their ideology when they actually find themselves in that position. Many people who are pro-choice may choose to sacrifice themselves for the baby; many pro-life women choose to abort even when the pregnancy isn’t life-threatening. This isn’t just theoretical; it’s well documented that people’s ideological beliefs are only one factor in their life decisions, and other factors may well prevail in any given situation. Zoe isn’t conscious; that puts Washington in a hell of a position.
Second, the baby may be viable, but severely debilitated - almost certainly very pre-mature and thus iffy as to its ability to survive. Similarly, Zoe may survive, but never recover entirely. I don’t think that the choice boils down to perfectly healthy baby versus perfectly healthy mother very often. If I were Zoe’s husband (unlikely in the extreme given that I am a straight female myself), my choices would be very much affected by the actual medical situation. Ideologically, my choice would be to save the mother. But if the real choice were between a chronically physically miserable mother and a healthy baby, I’d probably save the baby, not wanting to condemn my wife to a lifetime of pain and helplessness. If I were a person who was strongly pro-life, I’d still think twice if the choice was between a healthy mother and a crippled, miserable baby. The realities also include financial elements as well - not only the immediate medical costs, but the long term costs of caring for a baby or a mother with chronic medical problems. We like to think that finances don’t play into our medical decisions, but the fact is, even when they don’t, they probably should, because in the long run, they are going to have a major impact on everyone’s quality of life. (Extreme example - a permanently vegetative child versus the ability of your other children to go to college)
What I’m driving at is that, in real life, I think the choices are usually more complicated than just ideology. Morality is more than a set of rules; sometimes you have to look at what constitutes kindness and mercy as well, and sometimes there are simply limits on what you can do.
Ever hear of Nancy Klein?
As far as I can tell, the abortion part of this scenario is a red herring. The real issue is whether Zoe has effectively communicated a decision regarding her medical treatment to Wash, and whether he should honor that decision when placed in a situation that allows him to reject it.
I chose option 1, but you left out my best answer: “Don’t terminate and left the wife die because she’s an idiot, and the gene pool needs to be skimmed.”
Of course he wouldn’t actually do that. He would rationalize a reason to terminate the pregnancy.
But you asked what he SHOULD do.
In most cases though, where it’s either or, don’t doctors usually say which has one has the best chance of survival? (If Zoe isn’t conscious, that is)
I’m not sure how she’s relevant, because the article doesn’t say that she herself had any stated position on abortion, and it’s not clear as to whether or not she could have carried the baby to term while in a coma. But she is a good example of how things aren’t straightforward. She apparently agrees with her husband’s decision, yet they are still divorced (not clear as to why). She recovered, but not fully. We don’t know if the baby could have survived or in what shape it would have been in, and those may have been factors in the husband’s decision. It’s hardly ever so cut and dried as in Skald’s hypothetical.
I chose “to terminate; better that Zoe live on hating him than die for an irrational reason.”
I have no problem valuing human life more than irrational assumptions. Failure to respect a particular belief held by someone in no way devalues your respect for that person overall. Wash already knows this, since he and Zoe agreed to disagree on this matter in the first place, while still maintaining an uncompromised loving relationship.
Take the emotionally-charged issue of abortion out of the equation for a second. Suppose my wife were to come to me one day and say, in all calmness and sincerity, “Roland, if evidence of life on other plants is ever uncovered, I want to end my life, for I believe that surely the aliens will come and enslave humanity, and I don’t want to live in that world. Will you support me in this?”. I would say “No, darling, for while I love you dearly, that belief is a rather ridiculous assumption for which there is no evidence, and I do not respect it.” Then, after that, if alien life were to one day be discovered while my wife’s life was in my hands (for whatever reason), I would still fail to kill her, and wouldn’t consider it unethical — or at all disrespectful to my wife — to do so.
Skald’s hypothetical? Same deal, just fortified with extra pathos. The whole reason Zoe would (presumably) choose death is that she feels that an unviable fetus is a person, and thus abortion would be murder, an action which she’d rather die than commit. I can respect the latter part of that, but the former is an assumption for which I have never seen any compelling evidence, and I’m not making the decision to end a person’s life based on it. This isn’t disrespectful to my wife, it’s disrespectful to her irrational belief, for which I never had any respect in the first place. If she wants to consider me a murderer after the fact, then that sucks, but the fact that she — the only person whose life was ever in question in the first place — is still around to hate me for it is sufficient evidence for me that I’m not one.
It’s important to me to note, though, that the whole reason this is true is because, in Skald’s hypo and mine, the desire for death is based on a valid logical conclusion stemming from an irrationally-assumed premise. I believe that people have the right to end their own lives on their terms, and if my wife were to convince me that she wanted to die in Situation X because something objectively true would make living unbearable for her, then as much as it’d destroy me to do it, I’d honor that.
I’m not going to be nice here. The people who voted for keeping her alive do not love her. Full stop. If you love someone, you do what they want. And if you don’t love her, you shouldn’t be making the decision for her, because you shouldn’t be married to her or have had children with her.
As for the suicide thing: dying for refusing medical treatment is not suicide, or every dead cancer patient has committed suicide. Suicide cannot be achieved by inaction, only by action.
Please tell me you’re really really young.
Okay, I won’t be nice either then. That’s retarded. When did she say that she wanted to die along with a non-viable fetus?
BigT, do you understand that there is a difference between “I would not kill my child in order to save my own life” and “this fetus is going to die no matter what”? I am not going to, through inaction, murder her for the sake of a fetus that is dying anyway.
Crud. I forgot I’d already submitted, and was editing that post to be less incendiary, as well as explain my actual response. And it took longer than I had. Here’s what my post should have said:
I feel that love, especially the marital kind, requires putting your partner’s wishes above your own, even if it hurts. I would thus argue that the husband who would choose to allow the abortion did not love the woman.
As for the suicide thing: dying for refusing medical treatment is not suicide, or every mortally ill person has committed suicide… Suicide cannot be achieved by inaction, only by action.
No my response, as always, is to take a third option. I fail to see why you couldn’t just remove the baby. No killing the baby–just get it out. And then try to keep it alive. If/when that fails, they didn’t abort the fetus, it just died from a high risk potentially life-saving medical procedure that didn’t work.
At least that option is morally defensible from both sides. I hate false dichotomies.
ETA: My gut reactions, like the one I posted above, are often childish. Sorry. I should have waited a bit before hitting submit.
I’ll be reading the rest of the thread in a minute, but I just wanted to respond.
I am for the right of abortion, although I would hate to see “trigger-happy” abortions and I personally believe that there is almost always a better option (adoption?). Other people’s lives are not my choice, though. Still, when the mother’s life is at risk, my moral system says that abortion is mandatory, even if there is no consent. An unborn life IS a life, and it is very important; but the mother’s life comes out on top, if only by a slight margin.
Besides, in this scenario, letting the mother die wouldn’t save the baby anyways, would it?
In the hypothetical, Zoe already had two kids…
The OP doesn’t specify gestational age, but it does say “early in the pregnancy, *long *before the fetus is viable”. You want her to undergo a risky (exceptionally risky, in her condition) c-section to deliver a non-viable fetus?
And again, because it bears repeating, she never said that she was willing to die rather than abort a non-viable fetus.
That’s some definition of “love” you’re working with, there. What if she once said she’d rather die than get fat? Do you smother her with a pillow if she gains ten pounds and fails to lose it in some allotted amount of time?
If she says it about abortion, she could very well mean it, and I could very well see where she’s coming from.