Is one human life worth more than another?

[sean]

Originally Posted by DanaC

I just watched that interview and I thought he made some good points actually. I don't think it's so shocking. He's not advocating the euthanasia of babies born with a disability. He's advocating choice for families when a child is born severely disabled: it's a tricky one and difficult to draw legislative lines, but the example he gives of a baby born with no brain, but a brain stem is an interesting one.

Yeah, he seems pretty reasonable to me.

Personally I think religious sloganeering around the 'sanctity of life' is little more than a fetish. Keeping somebody in a persistent vegetative state for decades when children die every minute of the day for want of a handful of rice is simply perverse.

I know a little girl who is quite severely disabled, and to be honest, when she was a baby, I wondered about the point of her life. It was a lesson for me because she is very much loved and altho she requires constant care, she gives a lot back to those around her and is an inspiring person to know. I like her a lot.

But she isn't insentient, she's a thoughtful and clever little girl. Also, she lives in an environment with the resources to care for her. Where people have a more ongoing struggle for survival, I expect the balance shifts because the survival of a family or community can be endangered if one individual becomes a significant burden.

I have some faith in the power of love, and I think an ideology that compels a woman to carry an unwanted child to term, or compels parents to keep alive a child whose future is severely compromised by illness, is actually contemptuous of the power of love and I despise it.