ABORTION, EUTHANASIA, AND THE VALUE OF HUMAN LIFE

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SANCTITY

Sanctity means sacred. Sanctity of life means that life is given by God and therefore cannot or should not be taken by people. It is up to God when people are born and when they die. If something is ‘sanctified’ it is considered holy or blessed by God.

ABORTION, EUTHANASIA, AND THE VALUE OF HUMAN LIFE

A number of ethical questions cluster around both ends of the human life span. Whether abortion is morally justifiable has popularly been seen as depending on our answer to the question "When does a human life begin?" Many philosophers believe this to be the wrong question to ask because it suggests that there might be a factual answer that we can somehow discover through advances in science. Instead, these philosophers think we need to ask what it is that makes killing a human being wrong and then consider whether these characteristics, whatever they might be, apply to the fetus in an abortion. There is no generally agreed upon answer, yet some philosophers have presented surprisingly strong arguments to the effect that not only the fetus but even the newborn infant has no right to life. This position has been defended by Jonathan Glover in Causing Death and Saving Lives (1977) and in more detail by Michael Tooley in Abortion and Infanticide (1984).

Such views have been hotly contested, especially by those who claim that all human life, irrespective of its characteristics, must be regarded as sacrosanct. The task for those who defend the sanctity of human life is to explain why human life, no matter what its characteristics, is specially worthy of protection. Explanation could no doubt be provided in terms of such traditional Christian doctrines as that all humans are made in the image of God or that all humans have an immortal soul. In the current debate, however, the opponents of abortion have eschewed religious arguments of this kind without finding a convincing secular alternative.

Somewhat similar issues are raised by euthanasia when it is nonvoluntary, as, for example, in the case of severely disabled newborn infants. Euthanasia, however, can be voluntary, and this has brought it support from some who hold that the state should not interfere with the free, informed choices of its citizens in matters that do not cause others harm. (The same argument is often invoked in defense of the pro-choice position in the abortion controversy; but it is on much weaker ground in this case because it presupposes what it needs to prove--namely, that the fetus does not count as an "other.") Opposition to voluntary euthanasia has centred on practical matters such as the difficulty of adequate safeguards and on the argument that it would lead to a "slippery slope" that would take us to nonvoluntary euthanasia and eventually to the compulsory involuntary killing of those the state considers to be socially undesirable.

Philosophers have also canvassed the moral significance of the distinction between killing and allowing to die, which is reflected in the fact that many physicians will allow a patient with an incurable condition to die when life could still be prolonged, but they will not take active steps to end the patient's life. Consequentialist philosophers, among them both Glover and Tooley, have denied that this distinction possesses any intrinsic moral significance. For those who uphold a system of absolute rules, on the other hand, a distinction between acts and omissions is essential if they are to render plausible the claim that we must never breach a valid moral rule.

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ABORTION

Abortion is the termination of a pregnancy before the infant can survive outside the uterus. The age at which a fetus is considered viable has not been completely agreed upon. Many obstetricians use either 21 weeks or 400-500 grams (0.9-1.1 pounds) birth weight as the baseline between abortion and premature delivery, because few infants have survived when they weighed less than 500 grams at birth or when the pregnancy was of less than 21 weeks' duration. Generally speaking, the fetus has almost no chance of living if it weighs less than 1,000 grams (2.2 pounds) and if ...

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