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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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What if the existence of that child - just its existence, no concern for it's "productivity" - brings unquantifiable joy to its parents?

This is not the case for a baby with anencephaly or cyclopia. These babies are, besides being very obviously deformed in a way that is highly distressing to look at (go look for yourself if you want to see what I mean), an unequivocally disastrous result for a pregnancy. Again, they are absolutely unable to survive for more than a few days at absolute maximum, because their bodies lack basic components required to sustain a human life.

This slippery slope argument in roughly the shape of “If we admit that the life of an infant who literally never grew a brain doesn’t matter, we have to admit that no human life has inherent value” is, in my opinion, obviously specious and not worth taking seriously. No, I’m perfectly capable of believing that the lives of normal, functional, reasonably healthy people have inherent value, while rejecting the idea that there is significant inherent moral value in a clump of human-adjacent body parts which are not animated by a functioning human brain, or which are missing parts so crucial that its impossible to survive without them.

This is not the case for a baby with anencephaly or cyclopia. These babies are, besides being very obviously deformed in a way that is highly distressing to look at (go look for yourself if you want to see what I mean), an unequivocally disastrous result for a pregnancy.

That's just, like, your opinion, man!

But, seriously, you understand what I was trying to do there and with the rest of my comment; the "worth" of a human life is dependent upon its subjective relationship to other humans. Of course I can see that maybe a majority of parents with a child with those conditions you listed would be distraught. I also believe that some portion of them would treasure the fleeting moments with their child as worth it nonetheless (try to detect the anecdotal experience I'm insinuating here...).

The only remedy to this is to draw a line on when human life starts versus when it doesn't. I'm happy to have that discussion because I think it is unresolved at various levels (scientific, philosophic ... not religious, however). What I'm saying is that your rubric of "usefulness" or "worthy enough life" is specious because you're trying to apply an objective rule to what is a subjective problem.