Thanks. I was concerned that I wasn’t on the distribution list because I was past my Derbyshire-approved sell-by date.

I’m going to have to steal that line.

Terri could have been fed by hand. She was fed by tube because there was a risk of aspiration with hand feeding.

Yep, her esophagus was partially paralyzed. And using technology eliminated this risk and kept her alive. If she could of survived without the tube, Robert, she’d still be alive. If she could of survived without the tube, we would of never heard of her. There were more than enough people that wished to care for her. Don’t sit here and try to pretend that someone would spend thousands of dollars on unnecessary medical equipment. It makes no sense.

Stacy, your comments in 174 seem to me to be much more on-topic than the hypothetical stuff about aliens and “what if we could reprogram 2-day-old DNA”, and additionally more relevant to people’s real lives (albeit in hypothetical situations) than moral pronouncements which seem to be based on “do as I say, not as I [would] do.”

I think you’re on to something there… Hey…. HEY! I call shenanigans! ;)

I can understand Robert not wanting to draw it out on thread that is now getting kind of old, although the points I addressed (definition of person, ensoulment, and rape exception) were all his arguments. Sometimes it’s just easier to cherry-pick the “easy” arguments to address, like alien babies, rather than address an argument that could show that one’s personal philosophies on might… be flawed.

However, by failing to address the problem of arguing on faulty logic, Robert pretty much destroys his whole argument, being that it is based on ideas that he hasn’t bothered to back up, such as:

“The problem” is human.

You are treating a human as a thing.

And the death of an innocent. Minor detail, there.

Yes. At conception a new human life is begun.

As for why that’s morally significant, human life is special and should be protected.

I think we can all agree that arguing a point based on unproven assumptions renders one’s argument invalid and useless. So, he’s only really hurting his own credibility and shooting himself in the foot. And that’s fine by me.

Your daughter didn’t need a bottle to be kept alive. She could have been fed by any of the millions of currently lactating women on the planet. She could have been fed with a spoon or a straw or a dozen other things I can think of. So thats not really the same thing as a women who could only live via one kind of feeding tube.

I’ll forward it to you, zuzu.

Thanks. I was concerned that I wasn’t on the distribution list because I was past my Derbyshire-approved sell-by date.

Robert Says:

Sure, in exactly the same way that technology kept my baby daughter alive via her “bottle”.

Terri Schiavo was a disabled woman who had lost the ability to feed herself. The people who wanted to feed her were prevented from doing so, and she died. Like my daughter, there was no etiological factor that would cause her death; like my daughter, if people were prevented from feeding her, she would die.

Hmm, a still developing infant vs. a grown woman who’s had a large, rather crucial part of her brain completely destroyed. Yep, those are real similar all right.