re: #596 jamesfirecat

Lets have her deny the child her use to his organs, and then get him hooked up to an iron lung before we set him up for adoption.

So it’s not OK to kill him? It’s preferable to delay (keeping him hooked to her organs) during the period of time it might take you to deliver the child and hook up an iron lung or whatever else? (In the scenario posed the kid would need no special care after delivery; 38 weeks is essentially full term.)

Now that you’ve explicitly agreed that it’s OK to allow for some delay… care to explain why it’s OK to delay for a few hours but not for, say, 39 weeks? If we can “compromise” the use of her organs for a few hours, what principled reason to you have not to compromise for days or weeks?

if someone goes for a walk at night in New York City should we blame them if they get mugged?

If you get mugged, the person who mugged you is a criminal. You want to get your wallet back and put the criminal behind bars, but you don’t have the right to kill the guy after the fact. It doesn’t matter whether or not you were “responsible” or what precautions you took.

If you get pregnant, the person inside you is not a criminal. You’d like to get full use of your organs back, and you will 40 weeks later. Why should you have the right to kill to get full use of your organs back sooner? I don’t dispute that the consequence was “unwanted”, same as a mugging — what I dispute is that “therefore, you should be able to kill them” is an appropriate response.

You’re perfectly willing to force my friend to keep a baby mooching off of her organs for a few hours while you deliver him. At what point does it become OK to kill instead?

(One can fairly argue that “it’s not human until such-and-such development stage”, but at that point the argument isn’t about a human using your organs anymore.)

re: #619 jamesfirecat

Do we let random fully grown people use our organs just because they would die without them?

“Random”? That makes the analogy not work very well. In what sense is your own offspring implanting in the uterus “random”?