Are hospitals justified in pulling the plug on life support of a permanently vegetative adult?
Edited.
Is a permanently vegetative adult going to be perfectly self sustaining in 6 months?
Otherwise, you have created another false dichotomy.
The parallels are the same.
Not even close. One has no chance of recovery, while the other is undamaged. The baby is perfectly healthy.
When brain function ceases, the person is considered medically dead. So, in other words, it is a direct extension of Rousseau: "I do not think, therefore, I am not." I, of course, being the awareness of self and any other thing.
I find it telling that you gravitate to Rousseau; he who declared that the underclasses were "Ape Men" not worthy of civil protection, that property rights were a farce; and like all of the left, a totalitarian opposed to the very concept of liberty.
{The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked. Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does man, who so far had considered only himself, find that he is forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations. Although, in this state, he deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted, that, did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left, he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it for ever, and, instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal, made him an intelligent being and a man}
The thinking is what makes us human.
Rousseau postulates that obedience to rulers is what makes us human. Without submission to rulers, we are but a " stupid and unimaginative animal." Rousseau promoted a dictatorship of the proletarians a full century before Marx and was unquestionably the catalyst for many of the ideals that would ultimately form Marxism.
Perhaps love of abortion is simply a manifestation of the hatred one feels for the species in general?
It doesn't have to be high level thinking, but that thinking has to occur, otherwise, it's still life, but it isn't really human life. What separates humans from mice or dogs or cows or cockroaches is sentience. You recognize this separation, you just believe that fetuses are somehow mystically more important than an adult human in a vegetative state.
Edited.
"The worth of a man is not what he is, but the potential of what he may become," - Voltaire
We are more than a snapshot in time, otherwise one would be justified in killing those asleep or who have fallen ill.
I've provided clear evidence that fetuses are not able to sense ANYTHING until around the 20th week.
You have provided the limitations of our technology to determine precisely what developments are present or absent.
At 6 weeks gestation, we have DNA that confirms the species as human, blood type distinct from the mother, a functioning brain and a functioning heart. Further, we have irrefutable evidence that the condition will IMPROVE, rather than degrade.
Your position is spurious and defies scientific fact, a justification made for a conclusion held, rather than a conclusion drawn from the available facts.
They don't hear, feel, think, see or perceive.
{Ann Byrd began reading her baby Dr. Seuss books as soon as she became pregnant. She read emails aloud at work and her husband recited whatever he was reading in bed. She also played the fetus a classical music CD for 30 minutes each day. “My husband and I have a long-standing joke that our gene pool has a little too much chlorine in it,” she says. “We were going to do everything we could to make him as smart as possible.”
She believes her son recognized that music when he was born. “It was the CD we used to calm him,” Byrd says. Today, the 4 year old’s vocabulary is advanced and he tested into his district’s gifted program. “There’s no proof that any of this did anything for his intelligence, but I honestly believe it played a role,” she says.
While babies may recognize the stories they were read or music they listened to in the womb, experts say there’s no evidence that prenatal exposure to classical music or books will make your baby smarter. We do know that once they’re born, babies know the sound of their mother’s voice and prefer hearing it. They also prefer to hear whatever language she’s been speaking, since they’re familiar with those sounds.}
Pregnancy Magazine | Baby's First Classroom
Up until the brain develops to a degree of complexity that these tasks are possible, these higher level thinking functions do not exist. Thus, terminating a pregnancy before the point of sentience is not the same, morally, as killing someone. Because, in order to kill someone, they have to be sentient. Otherwise, it isn't isn't killing. It's dinner.
Edited. you abuse the word "sentient." Which is the CAPACITY not the actuality.
You have zero problems with dinner, you're just having religious objections to being classified in the same way that you classify other living beings.
Edited.
The last refuge of the pro-abort.
Tell us, which "religion" is it that I follow?
