So what is a person saying when they want a tumor removed? When they want chemo? When they want a hysterectomy? When they want vaccines? What are they saying when they
refuse such treatments/recommendations? In what important way(s) are they different forms of "You can't do that to me!"/"Please do this to me."?
Also, when you imply that the will of the mom is trumping the will of the fetus, what do you mean by "will"? Do you mean something like the
expressed desire of the fetus to live their life? If not, do you mean the
potential expressed desire of the fetus to live their life? If the former, how does that make any sense? If the latter, why should someone's
expressed desire be overridden by an almost-someone's
unexpressed desire? Do you regard the mother and the fetus as being on
equal ground in terms of self-awareness, goals, desires, needs, etc?
---------- Post added at 02:41 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:55 PM ----------
I should say also that I’m not making an argument in opposition to the OP. I do find it to be a little forced, but it nonetheless touches on serious moral considerations that shouldn’t be blithely swept away by misconstruals of the argument.
With regard to the question about “will”, what I’m getting at is the question of conscious experience. It seems to me that the capacity of conscious experience should play a role in the conversation, but with the way you’ve framed the OP, the capacity for conscious experience is simply
assumed to be there.
In your view, does it matter
at all whether or not the z/e/f is capable of conscious experience? And if it doesn’t matter
at all, how do you square that with cases such as the
Terri Schiavo case where she wasn’t capable of conscious experience? Also, just for the sake of discussion:
Suppose that Terri Schiavo had said at some point that if she were ever in an accident where she was in a presumably irrecoverable vegetative state, that she wished to remain on life support indefinitely pending the possibility an undiscovered technology that would allow her mind to be restored. In such a case, should she have been granted that wish
irrespective of the overall burden imposed on anyone affected by that effort?
Another scenario:
In 2014 a Texas woman was kept on life support against the wishes of her family because she was 14 weeks pregnant when she died. The woman in question was a paramedic, and had expressed to her husband that she never wanted to be kept artificially alive. However, the hospital refused to accommodate this based on a law that "required that lifesaving measures be maintained if a female patient is pregnant - even if there was written documentation that this was against the wishes of the patient or the next of kin". In this case, people were keeping a person an unconscious person alive against their expressed wished based on the fact of her pregnancy. Did the hospital behave morally in this case?
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