From Francis Canavan’s The Pluralist Game:
If we take the principles of liberal individualism as axiomatic, we find it possible to think of the fetus and the woman as the parties of the first and second part arguing over their respective rights. We are then able to blind ourselves to the natural fact that they are related as mother and child and that the child is in the only natural place for him to be, his mother’s womb (italics added).
January 5th, 2010 | 9:32 pm | #1
A woman can not argue with her husband (brain dead but on life support following a car accident) over their respective rights. The husband is legally, medically, (and at least in the eyes of the Catholic Church) spiritually dead. Thus we can infer two important criteria: 1, for a human to be a person, they must have a brain; 2, their brain must have some measure of electrical activity.
So when are the unborn capable of “arguing,” that is, thinking? The brain does not begin to form in the fetus until the neural tube closes which doesn’t happen until some time in the fourth week after conception.
January 6th, 2010 | 10:01 am | #2
@R Hampton,
Not sure if you are making the point to justify abortion before four weeks?
Most mothers do not find out they are pregnant until they are four weeks pregnant. I am a bit leery about tying personhood to brain function. I venture to think that one’s soul is still with the body even if one is “brain dead”. The the developing unborn baby has all the capacities for being a human person, even if those capacities have not been realized. Just because the unborn baby happens to be located inside it’s mother and dependent on her body for growth does it mean that such a life ought not to have value and be defended.
January 6th, 2010 | 2:32 pm | #3
I venture to think that one’s soul is still with the body even if one is “brain dead”
Of course there is no way to prove this, so you err on the side of caution — understandable. But then logically you should also believe that most organs used in transplants are taken from the living. As one woman put it: Bernice Jones came to Rome last week to tell the world that doctors killed her son by removing his organs. “Brain death is not death” and “organ donation is very deceptive,” the bereaved mother told LifeSiteNews.com in an interview on Thursday.
And that leaves us in a moral quandry. Gilbert Meilaender, a Valparaiso University bioethicist and member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, explains: One is faced with a choice of saying that the notion of brain death doesn’t work, and since you’re not supposed to take organs from a donor until they’re dead, we have to stop doing a lot of transplantation — or you can find a better explanation for why total brain failure constitutes the death of an organism. We offer a better philosophical explanation.
The explanation follows: The brain is important not because it controls physiological processes, but because of what these processes represent: engagement with the world … Engagement, takes three forms: openness to the world, an ability to act on the world, and the need to do so. These abstract requirements can be met by something as basic as breathing — but they are not met by physiological activities that continue in people who have lost all neurological function
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