NightlyPoe said:
sundin13 said:
How exactly is "human life" defined?
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Once a life starts, it's human. Life starts at conception at which point it is a separate entity. Hence my original answer.
| And why should this "human life" inherently be protected? |
The right to live is the most basic of rights. Without it, all the others are meaningless. After all, the right to speak or worship as you choose is meaningless if someone has the right to end your life before you can do so.
| In this vein, do you consider it abhorrent when the plug is pulled on someone who is brain-dead and on life support? |
Keeping a body from naturally expiring through artificial means is a separate ethical question. Indeed in many ways, you've presented an inverse of the question of abortion.
-In one, the question is whether medicine should be allowed to be used as a method to intervene with nature and terminate a life.
-In the other, the question is whether medicine should be mandated to intervene with nature and artificially extend a life.
As such, the overlap between the two is not as great as you may believe. For myself, I am not an absolutist on the subject. To give an extreme, I certainly wouldn't favor forcing patients onto ventilators against their will. However, I tend to side with caution when it comes to withholding or withdrawing life-extending medical intervention. If there's doubt or controversy, I will typically side with life.
But either way, I don't believe that asking such a question (or any other ethically thorny question) sheds as much light on the subject of abortion as you might believe.
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Bolded:But what does life being human matter,he has the right to suffer and die after being born instead of being aborted?
