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I think barring cases where therapy would likely involve growing a new brain for them, such as microcephalic infants, in an ideal world everyone should be kept alive until we have the medical treatment to heal them, which I wager is easily within the current nominee life expectancy of most people reading.
Unfortunately, we live in a far from ideal world and budgets aren't infinite, so I have no qualms about letting die those who are an onerous burden.
For a more formal/object assessment criteria of how much a year of one person's life is compared to the average, we have QALY and DALY which adjusts for "quality" and disability respectively, to formalize the intuitive notion that a year of a doddering dementia patient's life is not worth as much as one of a healthy 20 yo.
A baby that no amount of money would save today before they die would certainly qualify for someone who should be allowed to die, or at least be cryogenically preserved in the hopes of resuscitation in a more enlightened age.
Regardless of earnest hand-wringing about the sanctity of life and how it's beyond such loathsome things as cost-benefit analysis, you don't see the global GDP diverted to help an orphan that fell down a well, or the Pope emptying the church's coffers for the sake of any old malarial infant.
Since it must be done, then it's best done as intelligently as we can manage, instead of letting moral outrage do all the work.
Diabetic babies aren't particularly expensive to rear, the Indian government, impoverished as it is, can give insulin away for free, and even the blind are being cured with reproducible therapies that promise to end the disease once and for all, no need for miracles not of our own making.
Sure, but our friend didn't make any fine distinctions when talking about "healthy descendants". So what level of health counts as 'healthy' for his purposes?
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If the cost is being borne largely by private actors, what cost is it to the government? Surely, if a private individual or charity group is able and willing to direct their funds to keeping those children alive, they should be allowed to, no?
You do see people expend hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, to save kids trapped in a cave or save an individual diver who went into a cave, however. Much of that is almost always from the national coffers. To say nothing of charities who's entire goals are to save such people, regardless of said cost.
If society can forward cash from its coffers toward elderly patients at nursing homes, it can spend some money keeping some kids alive. Especially if a society-- hell, an individual- chooses to shoulder that burden, keeping most of the cost of the existence of that child out of a country's own economic burdens. It's one thing to say "the state will not fund this any more" - it's another too deny access and use of private resources.
I have no objection to this at all. By all means, people should be allowed to make hail mary attempts as long as they're taking the financial burden upon themselves.
This does not change the fact that the willingness to pay is not infinite, far from it.
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