Quote:
Originally Posted by GeraintIsMyHero
I don't think comparing a foetus to a coma patient is really appropriate. At the end of the day, if you chose to not feed a newborn baby there would be nothing it could do about it so it wouldn't be able to survive alone out of the womb either.
This isn't a for or against argument, simply that a coma patient is an entirely different situation.
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It's only appropriate in the context of what counts as "murder". There's a difference between being dependant on care from outside sources to survive and being incapable of respiration, organ function etc. Someone who is elderly or disabled or whatever might require constant care and attention to survive, but killing or neglecting them would still be a crime because they're a living person.
A coma patient on life support isn't legally considered to be alive, and the machine is just on until someone decides to turn it off and allow them to die. Similarly, a foetus at 10 weeks barely even qualifies as a human, and certainly isn't capable of any kind of "life" on its own. Calling the termination of a pregnancy at that point of development "murder" is pretty absurd in my eyes.