Same sex marriage and the slippery slope.

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@ LKL

The issues you are raising with your questions are totally valid and important. However I have no problem with stating that a parasitic twin is a human being. What is important is also important to how we classify human life is the matter of medical treatment. As a pro-life Christian I naturally tend towards the rights of the child and believe we should base our medical decisions around the continuaton of such life. However when protecting human life we do not escape our duty of care to other lives, the mother, the other twin all have their own life that is worthy of protection. A doctor who in the process of atrempting to save two lives cannot save both has not committed any wrong in my view. This is echoed in the worked of Pope Pious XII, who said as much in his writings on life.

The number of women who must have abortions in order to be saved however does not justify abortion on demand or debates about the personhood of the unborn. The number of such women represent a tiny fraction of people who access abortion services.

I am not being obtuse because most first world nations take a much more liberal stand than my own nation.


Ok, but we're not defending it on the grounds of it being the status quo, we're defending it on the grounds of the neurology, and neither party is really speaking from a position of absolute ignorance, as it is not as if either one of us are huge defenders of the status quo in a lot of cases.


Ok, but that's a different issue, you're now inserting an additional qualification. Part of the issue with comas is that there is a continuity with an earlier person, but to argue when a person emerges is entirely different, as the reason why we allow persistent vegetative state people to die is because there isn't a person there by our understanding of the matter. Which means that applying this to abortion should indicate that if all that is met is the basics for a persistent vegetative state, then the fetus is also not a person.


Eh, screw it. LKL, do you mind what gender I call you? I am terrible with gender, and I default to "he" way too often.


This has everything to do with that side point.


I'd love it if you stopped responding.

I really hate quoting myself, but does any liberal here care to explain what the hell is going on in California where they are having 2nd graders strip naked in class and then the next week 2nd graders perform sex acts.

@AG: No, I don't care what gender you call me. The internet is pretty asexual w/o pictures.

@91: I assume that you mean that you'd call a parasitic twin a human being if it was mostly whole. what if it was, say, half a body? What if it's just a foot, or an extra kidney? What if it's an entire body, except for the head? Is it still, then, a human being? What if it's not life-threatening to the host, but just 'inconvenient' or painful?

@inuyashya:
Start a new thread. While terrible, that is irrelevant to this one.

Last edited by LKL on 22 Jan 2011, 3:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.

If they were having students strip in class, the teacher wouldn't have gotten suspended.

Way to make a perverted teacher out to be the 'consequence' of same sex marriage, though.

There's a lot of arguments being made by the anti-gay marriage supporters which to me don't make any sense. One big example I notice is the idea that kids adopted by gay couples would become gays themselves. It's nonsensical because the majority of gays originate from straight families (even being raised in straight families for years) and if a child who is raised by a gay couple does turn out to be gay, in the end that child will still have originated from the straight parents who made them.

It's amazing how much this side is able to get away with their arguments without providing any real stats or evidence to back their claims up. What's the point of debate if you keep hearing two sides jabber back and forth about what they think is right and that's all you have to go on? Even the pro-gay arguments of "separation of church and state" can only be used for so long before the voters feel it's too dull and redundant. You need to think big, cater to what the voters REALLY care about (more profit and less taxes). If the pro-gay side had argued more on the side of "this can make alot of money for the state" versus the "it's not constitutional" argument, I think Prop 8 would've had a better chance of failing...especially given how financially bad things are in California.

@LKL

The principle of double effect is well established in Catholic teaching. However there really is a lack of precedent on some of the examples you have put forward. As to the treatment of a parasitic twin, the treatment rule of double effect would most likely apply. Despite rumors about the centrality of Catholic decision making, in such cases in Catholic Hospitals, usually an ethicist is bought in and advice is sort. The decision is usually made by the doctors in consultation with the ethicist (which is pretty common in secular hospitals also). Though the Church does have a blanket rule against a direct abortion (though recent developments in the treatment of ectopic pregnancies with relation to fertility has made this again an open question to be decided case by case).

Parasitic twin cases such as I have described are very certainly rare, but not unheard of.

wrt. ethicists and difficult decisions:
http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Media/church-e ... d=10799745

there's also all of the women who have died in Nicaragua since their imposition of a church-backed anti-abortion law.
http://scienceniche.com/culture/anti-ab ... eaths.html
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39870
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Nicaragua

The reason for the excommunication was the fact that the abortion was not actually done to save the patient's life. The Church forbids all cases where the child is aborted and other viable treatments are available. The story has been warped by the media, the lady had pulmonary hypertension, her life would only have been in danger had she carried into the third trimester (the child had a chance to live). The Hospital in question had been cutting ethical corners for a while, this was the final straw. This also provides a good example of how the local Bishops tend to be the deciders in these cases, not the Holy See.

http://www.catholic.org/national/nation ... p?id=36604

As to Nicaragua, I am not familiar with specifics and can only fall back to cannon law, which is described in the article.

from your link, quote:
The woman, whose identity is anonymous, was reportedly seriously ill with pulmonary hypertension.
...if the treatment sought addresses the direct causes of the woman's health condition (such as radiation treatment for cancer), but never intends to kill the unborn child (even though that may happen as a secondary, but unintended, effect of the lifesaving treatment), then it is morally licit.

..."An unborn child is not a disease. While medical professionals should certainly try to save a pregnant mother's life, the means by which they do it can never be by directly killing her unborn child. The end does not justify the means," the prelate said.

...The point of fetal viability is estimated at anywhere between 21 - 24 weeks, he indicated, at which point a baby can artificially be delivered and have a good shot at surviving. In the meantime the mother's pulmonary hypertension could be treated, even by such simple things as eliminating salt from her diet, exercising, or losing weight.
The idea that 'eliminating salt, exercising, or losing weight' would be a cure for pulmonary hypertension during pregnancy is, frankly, medically laughable. Normal treatments for normally 'bad' high blood pressure during pregnancy include diuretics, powerful blood pressure meds, strict bed rest (ie, not getting up for anything, period, much less exercising), and anticonvulsants. Ultimately, the only cure is to end the pregnancy. Usually extremely high blood pressure only occurrs towards the end of pregnancy or even just during labor, and the cure is simply a ceasarian delivery.

about 'normal-bad' pregnancy induced hypertension:
http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/261435-overview
quote:
* Hypertensive disorders in pregnancy are among the leading causes of maternal mortality, along with thromboembolism, hemorrhage and nonobstetric injuries. Between 1991 and 1999, pregnancy-induced hypertension caused 15.7% of maternal deaths in the United States.4
* While maternal diastolic blood pressure (DBP) greater than 110 mm Hg is associated with an increased risk for placental abruption and fetal growth restriction, superimposed preeclamptic disorders cause most of the morbidity due to chronic hypertension during pregnancy. Severe maternal complications include eclamptic seizures, intracerebral hemorrhage, pulmonary edema due to capillary leak or myocardial dysfunction, acute renal failure due to vasospasm, proteinuria greater than 4-5 g/d, hepatic swelling with or without liver dysfunction, and disseminated intravascular coagulation and/or consumptive coagulopathy (rare). Consumptive coagulopathy usually is associated with placental abruption and is uncommon as a primary manifestation of preeclampsia.
* Fetal complications include abruptio placentae, intrauterine growth restriction, premature delivery, and intrauterine fetal death.
* Hypertension before pregnancy or during early pregnancy is associated with a twofold increased risk of gestational diabetes mellitus.5

About the pulmonary hypertension of the woman in question:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... =126985072
quote:
She was 11 weeks pregnant with her fifth child, and she was gravely ill. According to a hospital document, she had "right heart failure," and her doctors told her that if she continued with the pregnancy, her risk of mortality was "close to 100 percent."
The patient, who was too ill to be moved to the operating room much less another hospital, agreed to an abortion.

I think that the bishop in question made the assumption that this woman had normal chronic hypertension exacerbated by pregnancy, and did not bother to review the specifics before punishing the nun. There is, however, this quote from the same source as above:
"She {the nun}consented in the murder of an unborn child," says the Rev. John Ehrich, the medical ethics director for the Diocese of Phoenix. "There are some situations where the mother may in fact die along with her child. But — and this is the Catholic perspective — you can't do evil to bring about good. The end does not justify the means."{emphasis mine.}

I have personally seen both a pregnancy that was inadequately monitored at home and resulted in full-blown ecclampsia, a seizing mother, cardiac arrest of the mother during the ambulance ride to the hospital, and permanent brain damage to the mother after an emergency ceasarian; and an abruption of the placenta, in a woman who was a coworker of mine and the wife of another coworker, already the mother of two children; she was literally 5 minutes from the OR and had an emergency hysterectomy (the baby survived), and ended up taking 4 units of blood (twice the normal amount of an out-patient transfusion). Had she not been in the hospital when the abruption occurred, she would have bled to death. Those were both merely 'normal-bad' events.

I respect your medical knowledge. However, the review determined that she could have carried to the point of an early delivery, giving the child a chance to survive. It's also worth indicating that the nun was not excommunicated by the prelate, she was excommunicated by the action.

It's part of a larger narrative, as people here have said morality is all relative. What's to say that in the future there would be a push for children to be pushed into marriage too.

The point is that a slippery slope argument isn't always a false one, it sometimes is a legitimate argument.

Care to be more specific? Is that 60% of people who feel uncomfortable with third-trimester abortions for any reason who you are now going to quote as supporting your extreme "life at conception" stance?

I mean... plenty of people who would be labeled as "pro-choice" would still favor some restrictions on abortion. They still don't agree with you on the more substantive issues, and citing an unsourced poll and leaving significant ambiguity as to what the poll actually said does absolutely nothing to help your case.

Yeah seriously, you're gonna have to provide some background into your statistics and not keep it so vague.

Same-sex marriage = yes
Multiple partners = yes
Everything else = no

This is a good point. Even those of us who are making the pro-choice argument here are generally in favor of 'some restrictions on abortion,' in that we would start to limit 3rd trimester abortions to cases of endangerment to the mother and abnormality of the fetus.

@91: The doctors believed that this woman's life was in extreme danger. The priests decided otherwise. In medical decisions, I will trust a doctor over a priest any second of any day, and I thank the goodness of Sister McBride that she deferred to the doctors in that case.