{"id":243600,"date":"2021-04-21T07:27:48","date_gmt":"2021-04-21T12:27:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=243600"},"modified":"2021-04-22T16:48:16","modified_gmt":"2021-04-22T21:48:16","slug":"salons-ableist-attempt-ethical-case-abortion-flat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/salons-ableist-attempt-ethical-case-abortion-flat\/","title":{"rendered":"Salon op-ed claims some humans aren’t persons, so it is ‘ethical’ to kill them"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>

A pro-abortion physician and a professor have levied an attack on the pro-life argument in Salon<\/a>, calling it \u201cweak.\u201d\u00a0<\/span>The authors \u2014 Dr. Nathan Nobis, an associate professor at Morehouse College, and Dr. Jonathan Dudley, a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins \u2014 assert that abortion advocates need to be comfortable making an \u201cethical\u201d case in support of abortion in order to counter pro-life arguments. However, their attempts to construct such a case collapse under the application of rudimentary logic.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Claim: Some humans are not actually ‘persons’, so it’s acceptable to kill them<\/strong><\/p>\n

Their case is built upon two examples in which they argue that certain humans are not actually \u201cpersons,\u201d and therefore are unworthy of legal protection. These nonpersons are organ donors and <\/span>anencephalic babies<\/span><\/a>. According to the authors, these commonplace cases undercut the pro-life argument because these are examples of things that happen all the time and that most people accept because \u2014\u00a0they argue \u2014\u00a0of the lack of consciousness involved.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the first case, they claim that doctors “kill” organ donors who have suffered “complete brain death\u201d and are kept on respirators with hearts pumping blood throughout their body as physicians harvest their organs. To the authors, those who are \u201ckilled\u201d by doctors for their organs in this way are not \u201cpersons\u201d because \u201cthey lack brains capable of supporting any type of consciousness.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Regarding anencephalic infants, they note that common medical practice is to provide palliative care but not to artificially prolong their lives. For the authors, this somehow proves these babies \u201ccannot be persons,\u201d since they are unable to develop \u201cconsciousness,\u201d and therefore a physician \u201cends their lives.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

To Nobis and Dudley, this ableism is the bedrock of their argument. To them, human beings must be conscious, or capable of consciousness. They write that \u201cthis suggests that beginning fetuses are not persons either, since they too lack consciousness-enabling brains. So the pro-life claim that all embryos and fetuses are persons is not true.” They continue: “So, is abortion murder? Does it violate human rights? Not unless other widely-accepted medical procedures that end human life are also wrong. But they aren’t, and neither is abortion.”<\/span><\/p>\n

But their argument fails to stand up to basic logic, and neither case is analogous to abortion.<\/span><\/p>\n

Debunking the organ donors and anencephalic babies argument<\/strong><\/p>\n

Organ donors frequently make a voluntary donation of their organs, with their intention declared with full knowledge and consent while they were capable of consciously making such a determination.\u00a0Additionally, the idea that organ donors are killed by doctors is not medically accurate. Organ donors must be declared dead by a competent medical authority\u00a0\u2014 not simply unconscious, but no longer capable of being alive except by extraordinary medical intervention, and then only temporarily \u2014\u00a0before organs are removed. As groups like the Center for Organ Recovery and Education<\/a> (CORE) point out, the declaration of brain death must be in accordance with accepted medical standards: \u201cAccording to the American Academy of Neurology, brain death is the irreversible loss of clinical function of the brain, including the brain stem, and is a legal declaration of death.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0Ableism helped pave the way for legalized abortion and remains a factor today<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Abortion takes the life of a preborn baby incapable<\/em> of giving consent to the procedure that will deliberately and directly cause<\/em> his or her death. In the case of a baby with anencephaly who survives to birth and beyond, treatment with palliative care does not constitute the deliberate ending of the child’s life; anencephaly itself eventually causes the death of the child, and palliative care is meant to provide comfort, not hasten death. As the <\/span>Centers for Disease Control and Prevention<\/span><\/a> says, \u201cThere is no known cure or standard treatment for anencephaly. Almost all babies born with anencephaly will die shortly after birth.\u201d But it is important to note that these children have not been declared brain dead, nor have they been legally declared dead. They are living children in whom parts of the brain and skull are missing. Some children with anencephaly have survived<\/a>\u00a0longer<\/a> than expected<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

“Consciousness” does not determine humanity<\/strong><\/p>\n

The authors\u2019 use of the abstract notion of \u201cconsciousness\u201d to make distinctions between humans who are and are not \u201cpersons\u201d is flagrantly ableist. <\/span><\/p>\n

Nobis maintains a blog called \u201c<\/span>Abortion Arguments<\/span><\/a>\u201d in which he addresses a question from a reader about his use of consciousness as a basis for calling preborn babies non-persons and how a sleeping person, for instance, does not lose personhood. Nobis responds by arguing that people who have once been conscious have memories and connections to their past consciousness, so killing a sleeping person does him harm. Yet, to Nobis, a preborn baby has never been \u201cconscious\u201d and therefore \u201cthings cannot go worse for them, since there really is no \u2018them\u2019 yet, since there is no person who experiences anything, and so there’s no person that things could take a turn for the worse for.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This is absurd. Human beings have value because of who and what they are, not what they do<\/em>\u00a0or what they are capable<\/em> of. Once we start judging people by arbitrary capabilities, we\u2019ve crossed into highly questionable territory not only ethically, but also legally. <\/span><\/p>\n

As Dr. Steve Jacobs said in response to a similar argument from Nobis, \u201ca <\/span>legal review<\/span><\/a> of the distinction between \u2018human\u2019 and \u2018person,\u2019 within the meaning of the U.S. Constitution, made it clear that there is none,\u201d according to <\/span>National Right to Life News<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cEthical arguments \u2014 and ethics education \u2014 can support the pro-choice side after all,\u201d Nobis and Dudley smugly write. If that\u2019s the case, pro-lifers would like to hear them, as no such arguments have been provided to date.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cLike\u201d Live Action News on Facebook<\/a>\u00a0for more pro-life news and commentary!<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A pro-abortion physician and a professor have levied an attack on the pro-life argument in Salon, calling it \u201cweak.\u201d\u00a0The authors \u2014 Dr. Nathan Nobis, an associate professor at Morehouse College, and Dr. Jonathan Dudley, a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins \u2014 assert that abortion advocates need to be comfortable making an \u201cethical\u201d case in support […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":606,"featured_media":209364,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false},"categories":[4,3,9459],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nSalon op-ed claims some humans aren't persons, so it is 'ethical' to kill them<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Once we start judging people by arbitrary capabilities, we\u2019ve crossed into highly questionable territory not only ethically, but also legally.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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