Pages

Tuesday, May 21, 2019

The grandparent analogy

I know of grandmothers and grandfathers who are entirely dependent on their families to care for them due to senility and dementia as well as physical frailty. In fact, sometimes one wonders if the lights are still on or if anybody's even home, because their dementia is so advanced. They don't seem like "persons" anymore.

If their families stopped caring for them, they would die. If their families kicked them out of their homes, these grandparents would be lost. They'd wander around in the cold night alone and afraid until they died if no one cared for them.

So does that give families the right to force their grandparents out of their home? Grandparents who have dementia and who no longer seem like "persons"? Of course not. That'd be considered murder. And even euthanasia activists require informed consent before euthanization.

In short, these families have no right to murder their dependent grandparents who don't seem like persons by turning them out of their homes. So why should families have the right to murder their dependent babies who don't seem like persons by turning them out of their wombs? Or are the two disanalogous? How so?

2 comments:

  1. > "Of course not."

    It seems fairly clear to me that within the very near future the answer of many Western politicians is going to be "of course". Faced with spiralling health and social costs, we're going to get very used to hearing that "their quality of life has degraded to the point where the kindest thing to do is to give them a peaceful, controlled and safe ending."

    ReplyDelete