Abortion and Clinical Death within the Law

[Delta4Embassy]

As recent cases involving brain dead people have shown, clinical death is when a person has no brain activity. So then life is if there is brain activity.

If the arguement over abortion is whether or not a fetus is a human being why isn't it simply whether or not the fetus has brain activity? If it does, it's a living human being (and not a fetus,) if not, it's a fetus and may be aborted.

 

[C_Clayton_Jones]

As recent cases involving brain dead people have shown, clinical death is when a person has no brain activity. So then life is if there is brain activity.

If the arguement over abortion is whether or not a fetus is a human being why isn't it simply whether or not the fetus has brain activity? If it does, it's a living human being (and not a fetus,) if not, it's a fetus and may be aborted.

Such a determination would need to be conducted in the context of substantive due process, and as a fact of Constitutional law 14th Amendment protections are afforded only postnatally. See Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992).

Fortunately the courts have wisely left the determination as to when ‘life’ begins to individuals to decide, in accordance with their own beliefs and good conscience, where the state lacks the authority to make such a determination. Only individuals have the capacity to make this determination in their own best interest, not politicians and bureaucrats.

Individuals are at liberty, therefore, to use whatever criteria they wish when making this determination in their own personal circumstance, but they may not seek to codify that belief in secular law all must obey.

 

[BobPlumb]

Scientifically the life of an individual begins at conception. This is settled science as Global Warner's like to say. The stage at which a human life should be legally protected is the question.

The clinically dead person has no brain activity and will never regain brain activity. This is not the case with a human at the earlier stages of development.

 

[Delta4Embassy]

Law's made decisions when life gets protected in some states that treat the unborn as born in cases of vehicular homocide. And more broadly as when someone's brain dead and 'really dead.' So if the unborn in a drunk driving accident can be factored in as a real person who may have been killed, and a brain-dead patient isn't a patient anymore (Oakland, and the EMT lady et al.) then why aren't those examples being cited and used to contest the legality of abortion? Instead of argueing whether a fetus is a baby and vice-versa, why not just cite these already decided cases as precedents where the unborn have been declared persons, and brain activity is the line that determines whether you're alive or not?