[quote]Cortes wrote:
Okay, I still ended up writing less than I have to say but this is certainly plenty to chew on for now.
Setting aside for a second my disagreements with euthanasia, the problems I see with your idea of the mother assuming “power of attorney” to grant consent to a mercy killing are:
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In the case of an adult, an argument (that I do not want to get into in this thread) could possibly be made for assisted suicide precisely because he does possess a will (or at least he once did) to request his life be ended. A baby has not yet developed to the point that she can make her own choices or even understand the world around her. She has never had the opportunity to give consent one way or the other, which leads me to my next point:
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No matter how bad she may believe their situation to be, there is no way she could possibly know that the life awaiting her child is bad enough that her child would be better off not existing to live it. This has all sorts of problems with it.
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First, she could be wrong. Life may not to be all that bad. She’s already in the state of mind to kill her own child, so she’s won’t likely be noticing the silver lining shimmering at the edges of those clouds. There are many biographies of famous, influential and important people who suffered through the worst of hardships before finally succeeding. Sometimes they succeeded despite those conditions, and often, very often, they succeeded exactly because the pain of those ordeals forced them to look at their world in a different way than they otherwise might have. Oprah Winfrey, as much as you may not personally like the woman, had a childhood so bad it would make a Francis Bacon exhibit look cheery. NO one, looking at her life then, could ever have guessed this girl would use the monstrous abuse she was subjected to to become of the the most powerful, most influential women of all time (who also apparently supports abortion - ahh my head is going to explode).
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Second, your argument assumes that a shitty life is actually a bad thing, enough so that death itself is preferable. MANY people disagree with this. They are the people who are living in shitty situations who have not killed themselves. The ones that did made their choice after they were allowed to weigh the options. But the child in your case would never have the chance to weigh those options. That might be okay, except that exactly what constitutes “a life not worth living” is a PURELY subjective concept. I just don’t see any way you can justify granting anyone the authority to determine the life or death of anyone based on such a foggy notion of just what constitutes “bad enough.” You couldn’t even create a scale, the situation is so infinitely complex.
- Moreover, your envisioned situation actually increases the number of people who would thereby be vulnerable to murder. All manner of people are born without the ability to develop a will of their own, and another entire subset exists in a state where the existence or absence of an independent will could never reliably be determined. If this were to become the case, though, how many mothers or caretakers, frustrated and tired and sick of devoting their lives to the care of their charges, would opt to “abort” them, at now any stage of life, and justify the act using the same defense as the mother who today aborts her own unborn child. That is, she is killing it out of “mercy.”
You and I are both adroit enough to realize that this excuse is almost never really the case. The mother who justifies murdering her child in the wombs is “mercifully” concerned about one person and one person only, herself and how her own life is going to be affected. If that is true in our present case, it most certainly would be true, and indeed an equivalent justification, if not the actual reason, for her choice.
Finally (for now), just as a mother cannot be said to possess the ability to accurately assess future quality of life for her child (she’d have to know literally everything), WE cannot accurately judge the quality of life for her child under her care. That she might not love her child, or neglect him, or abuse him is nothing but conjecture. But this conjecture is very often used as justification for her just going ahead and killing it (huh?).
Your argument of the act as “mercy killing,” exactly this assumption.
We don’t know a thing about that child’s future because there is NO EVIDENCE for future abuse or neglect. The experience may completely change her life, save her, even. She also may exceed our worst expectations and become the shittiest mother on earth. But until she actually commits a real crime against her child, unfortunate as it may be, we can’t do or say one thing about what is. We could as easily convict her for future crimes against her child as we could preemptively abort her baby by force. A scary thought, but not at all fantastic.
They’ve got a word for that kind of world. It’s called “China.”
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Yes the baby has not yet developed the ability to give consent, but waiting defeats the purpose of a mercy killing.
Sure, the mom doesn’t know the future, but the same can be said about any major decision made by anyone. All choices are a crapshoot, some just more than others. You can’t spend your life waiting on certainty, and when dealing with someone else’s life it’s better to err on the side of caution.
Then again, that pretty much sums up our entire disagreement; does erring on the side of caution mean carrying the child full term, putting it up for adoption and then letting life decide if it was a good choice, or does it mean aborting the child despite the fact that the child may have led a very lucrative and meaningful life?
I don’t know, and I guess that’s the point I’m trying to make. I don’t know what’s best for everyone, so I can’t justify acting as judge for the world’s problems. The best I can do is support giving people the option to use their best judgement for themselves and let life sort itself out.
Yes, that’s risky, but that’s the whole point of freedom. If the only things keeping our species alive are formalities and static, pre-made answers to the dynamic questions of life, then I contend we aren’t worth keeping around at all.
