Friday, December 30, 2005

Moral responsibility

Jill at Feministe has an interesting post on the story of an Egyptian child who was born with a head attached to his head. She goes on to tentatively compare this situation with pregnancy and the removal of the head with abortion.

Throughout that thread, there were the usual questions of whether a fetus is part of the woman's body, it's own separate entity with individual rights, or something in between. I happen to think that it's something in between. But what this documentary made clear is that there is no moral or ethical responsibility for one being to allow another to live off of it.


I'm not sure what Jill means by "something in between." Hopefully, she'll provide some answers in the comments section. It seems that being part of another organism and being an organism unto oneself would be diametrically opposed and that the unborn would have to fit in one biological category or the other.

This documentary made something clear to her but what if she viewed another hypothetical documentary. This documentary follows a woman who recently gave birth to a baby boy in far off land where baby formula doesn't exist and there are no other lactating women. This woman decides that she doesn't want to use her breasts to feed her child. The child eventually dies from malnutrition. Would Jill still believe that "there is no moral or ethical responsibility for one being to allow another to live off of it?"

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