Reply #188: Good Points

[outinforce]

Your post, Frodo, states much better the logical problem I was having yesterday evening with the logical construct that kiahzero had advanced.

You also state that we have no legal defintion of life. We h ave only a legal definition of death -- which, in some states at least, is the absence of brain waves. That is why a person whose heart and lungs are still functioning (albeit with the assistance of a ventilator), but whose brain waves have stopped, is a good candidate for organ donation. Her/His organs are still "alive", but s/he is legally dead.

Medically as well, I do not think there is wdie-spread real agreement as to when life "begins". I read just the other day where a physician had testified that a fetus who (which?) is the subject of a "partial-brith abortion" feels pain. I would venture to guess that it would be absolutely absurd to suggest that some "thing" which "feels pain" does not posess the quality which we call "life".

So what we are really left with, I think, is "life" as a philosophical issue. Many who call themselves "pro-choice" suggest that the folks who call themsevels "pro-life" get their view of life as a result of some religion, and it is no doubt true that a great many pro life folks are from a religious background which informes their views on abortion.

But there is also this point. Since neither medicine nor science can truly tell us when the quality we refer to as "life" begins, we are left, at best, with a legal definition. And undergirding any legal definition is a particular philosophical view of when "life" begins. The pro-life persosn who insists that her/his philosophical or religious point of view is that "life" begins at conception has as much validity to her/his philosophical viewpoint as a pro-choice person who insists that her/his philosophical point of view is that "life" only begins when the fetus is delivered, takes its first breath, and has its umbilical cord cut. Or the point of view of someone like kiahzero who says, I think, that even a fetus that has been born, taken its first breatrh, and has had its umbilical cord cut does not possess "life" -- even it it is in a NICU incubator -- until and unless it has developed not j ust the capadcity to emit brain waves, but has actually brain waves.

The difficulty, for most people, is that if kiahzero's point of view is just as valid as the point of view of a pro-life person, then there is nothing, really, to prevent someone from saying, as some -- including a professor whose name I forget but who recently taught at Princeton and who is from, I think, Australia, who has said that "life" really does not begin until some point long after birth and long after brain waves can be detected. He suggests that it would be perfectly OK, morally and ethically, for parents to kill their 'post-birth' fetuses, if doing so would bring "happiness" to the parents -- at any time before the "post-born fetus" is able to demonstrate the capacity to do certain things.