Some bits for reflection and discussion
A couple in their early twenties expect their first child. The wife begins labour at approximately thirty-four weeks' gestation. Ultrasonography is performed at a small community hospital, and the diagnosis is diaphragmatic hernia--inadequate lung development because of the presence of intestines in the chest cavity. When the family arrives at the hospital, the parents confer with the obstetrician and neonatologist. If premature labour cannot be stopped, the doctors plan to deliver the infant under controlled circumstances so that surgery for the hernia may be done immediately.
Two days later the infant is born and found to have gross limb deformities, including both forearms absent, no lower leg on the right side, and a deformed left foot. A diaphragmatic hernia is also confirmed. The parents decide to withhold surgery because of concern that their son would suffer too much from gross physical abnormalities.
An infant care review committee is immediately called. The subspecialties of surgery, physical therapy, neonatology, paediatrics, nursing, and respiratory care are represented, and a clergyman also attends. The consensus is that it is impossible to predict the quality of this infant's life and that since prostheses might be made available to render the subject a somewhat independent individual, surgery for the hernia should be recommended. When the parents still refuse, the committee reconvenes. At this meeting the question is whether the consensus is strong enough to try to obtain a court order to perform surgery against the parents' wishes. Consensus fails . . . .
Karen Ann Quinlan, in a persistent vegetative state, survived through the intervention of physicians for over eleven years, first on a hospital ventilator and then on artificial nutrition in a nursing home, despite her parents' wishes that she be allowed to die. Finally on June 13, 1986, she was pronounced dead, because her heart stopped due to increasing respiratory congestion. Her parents had requested no antibiotics or blood pressure medication be given and this request was heeded and obeyed
A Sydney businessman was jailed for four years for a callous and cowardly act of road rage that ended in a car crash that killed an unborn child. The man was tailgating motorists for two kilometres, shaking his fists at them and swerving to the wrong side of the road. He hit the car containing a woman and her fiancé, forcing them into a power pole. The woman who was 7 months pregnant had to have an emergency caesarean and a hysterectomy. But the man escaped a manslaughter charge over the death of Ms Shields unborn child, named Byron, because the law does not classify a child as human until it has taken its first breath. Hence the man was sentenced for dangerous driving causing grievous bodily harm.
Koko, the "talking" gorilla made the front cover of the National Geographic. This educated ape is reported to use five hundred words in sign language and understand five hundred additional words. Koko so mourned the accidental death of her pet kitten that another was given to her. Koko exhibits the qualities of personhood. How do we treat Koko?
People say she's not really communicating -- I think she's smarter than we are--
after all, how many of us can speak Gorilla!
-AOL Interview with Koko, a Gorilla who speaks sign language
Canadian Baby Michelle was born in 1986 with the diagnosis of anencephaly--absence of the neocortex and most of the cerebrum. Doctors later found that even the lower portions of her brain had died, and it was determined that she met the criteria for being considered whole-brain dead, and denied further treatment. However, Michelle’s heart was deemed suitable for use in transplantation and was removed from her body and given to another baby Paul Holc.
A Bioethics major wants to know -- if he cloned your mother, then slept with her, would you be upset?
Are these categories of beingness separate or, in order to be coherent, are these categories intermeshed and dependent on each other?
If they are intermeshed, how might they be intermeshed?
From a personalist perspective, these qualities are separable though the separation is gradual. From a hard-line physicalist perspective, these can be recognised as existent qualities of beingness, but they are not separable.