[Smoking & Abortion; Y120302]

 

You are demonstrating the very problem with this issue.  You are trying to define personhood by practicality or functionality and that is the slippery slope this article embodies.

I agreed that it was a slippery slope type issue. But you’re not dealing with the issue except to categorically state that there is a person in existence from the moment of conception and for which you have not given the slightest amount of proof. Seems it is predicated on a religious view of the soul being created at that point – and for which there is, again, not the slightest amount of proof or evidence.

 

But I’m curious: how do you feel about the death penalty? The Catholic philosopher of religion, Edward Feser, apparently has the same views as you do about abortion but is entirely supportive of the death penalty. Something doesn’t compute there.

 

Do you see your right to exist as impractical?

 

But I am, more or less, an autonomous and conscious individual, able to take care of my own needs and requirements for survival and am able to contribute to the commonwealth. Really not at all the case with the individuals that the article was talking about.

Everyone likes to emphasize the personal responsibility and tough decisions people must make after the fact, after conception, with respect to abortion, but most seem blind to actually emphasizing some personal responsibility and making tough decisions prior to conception.

I’ll agree with you on that point. While there are, no doubt, a great many cases of irresponsibility, it seems there are more than a few which aren’t. And in the former at least, maybe there would be fewer abortions, and less drain on the medical system, if people were obliged at least to pay for more the related financial costs.

As for battlefield triage, well, you know grandma is just using up too much of our resources staying in that nursing home, so let's just kill her.

 

Really not at all the same situations and conditions – suggesting they are the same really doesn’t do your argument or your credibility any good at all. Grandma has presumably contributed substantially to that commonwealth and has a few resources of her own, or of her kids, on which she can draw to maintain herself. When she gets to a “persistent vegetative state” then I would say that it would be an act of Christian mercy – which, at times, seems in rather short supply – to let her go, to kill her – particularly if she has left instructions to that effect.