The Abortion Question

[Brownshoe]

(09-30-2015, 06:03 PM)oncemoreuntothejimbreech Wrote: How so?  Technology has changed the definition of death and when we declare someone dead.

It only changed the perspective of death. Before we thought they were dead when they actually were alive. Death still had the same definition as before.

We know the fetus is alive we just ignore it because technology isn't advanced enough.

[oncemoreuntothejimbreech]

(09-30-2015, 06:02 PM)Brownshoe Wrote: Because it's not changing the point when someone is dead. Its just reviving them from death.

So the person is dead, then they aren't dead.  And to you technology isn't changing the point at which they are dead?

Okay, fine.

Brain activity.

http://www.uniformlaws.org/ActSummary.aspx?title=Determination%20of%20Death%20Act

Quote:In an era of rapid technological change, it is not unusual for technology to overcome medical, social and legal commonplaces. One instance of this is the legal standard for determining biological death. Advances in medical techniques and equipment have made it necessary to re-evaluate traditional legal standards for declaring a human being dead.

Such standards are necessary not because of death itself, but because of the effect in the law of the biological fact of death. Criminal law outlaws murder for the protection of life. Yet ironically, criminal law requires a legal determination of death upon which murder sanctions can be anchored. Determinations of death are also important in establishing the property relationships that arise through inheritance and devise. They are important in tort law to actions in wrongful death and survivor's action. The standards for determining death are not much of a problem for the deceased, but they are important to the living, who may be favored or disfavored in the law because of the biological fact.

The Uniform Law Commissioners (ULC) created the Uniform Brain Death Act in 1978 in an effort to clear up the legal ambiguity that had arisen over the question of determining death. It was plain that legal recognition only of traditional criteria—which rely on measuring cessation of respiration and circulation—would no longer suffice.

Clearly the brain, as the center of the human body, is its most important organ. Its irreversible functioning should be accepted as death. Nonetheless, cessation of respiration and circulation are easily detectable and have been the only means available to determine death until very recently. Direct detection of loss of brain function is a product of very modern technology.

Technology has made it necessary to find criteria other than respiration / circulation criteria. Those biological functions can now be maintained by "extraordinary means of life support" beyond the time the brain can be maintained. Therefore, a broader standard than the traditional one for determining death has become essential.

The Uniform Brain Death Act simply established that the "irreversible cessation of all functioning of the brain, including the brain stem" is death. It then prescribed that determination of death be made in accordance with "reasonable medical standards." The ULC assumed that the traditional criteria would stand automatically alongside the brain-death standard described in the uniform act, and so did not mention those criteria in the act itself. But this omission proved confusing for states trying to adopt comprehensive legislation on the subject.

The ULC corrected the situation in 1980 by replacing the act with the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA). The UDDA essentially leaves the old act's language intact, but adds "irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions" as an alternative standard for determining death. The term "reasonable medical standards" has also been changed to "acceptable medical standards."

The UDDA is intentionally not entitled the Definition of Death Act. This is because it does not contain an exclusive definition of death. It is concerned only with medical determination of biological death, and as such, complements existing and accepted definitions.
The act does not specify an exact means of diagnosis. To do so would guarantee its obsolescence as technology advances. Specifying criteria would inhibit advancement in technology, and also would inhibit the courts in determining the facts in each individual case and in recognizing acceptable standards as a dynamic, rather that static, concept.

The purpose of the UDDA is a minimum one. It recognizes cardiorespiratory and brain death in accordance with the criteria the medical profession universally accepts. The act does not authorize euthanasia or "death with dignity," and does not enact any sort of living will. The current state of medical decision-making as it relates to death, termination of life, or other related issues remains unchanged. These issues are left to other law. The UDDA simply attempts to relieve one relatively small problem in law and medicine, before it becomes a larger one.

[oncemoreuntothejimbreech]

(09-30-2015, 06:08 PM)Brownshoe Wrote: It only changed the perspective of death. Before we thought they were dead when they actually were alive. Death still had the same definition as before.

We know the fetus is alive we just ignore it because technology isn't advanced enough.

If someone has no pulse, respirations, and brain activity are they alive or dead?

[Brownshoe]

(09-30-2015, 06:13 PM)oncemoreuntothejimbreech Wrote: If someone has no pulse, respirations, and brain activity are they alive or dead?

I'm an engineer not a medical doctor so I couldn't tell you.

[Brownshoe]

(09-30-2015, 06:10 PM)oncemoreuntothejimbreech Wrote: So the person is dead, then they aren't dead.  And to you technology isn't changing the point at which they are dead?

Okay, fine.

Brain activity.

http://www.uniformlaws.org/ActSummary.aspx?title=Determination%20of%20Death%20Act

So how does this change when someone is dead? To me it just seems like we aren't changing when someone is dead, but just reviving someone from death.

[oncemoreuntothejimbreech]

(09-30-2015, 06:21 PM)Brownshoe Wrote: I'm an engineer not a medical doctor so I couldn't tell you.

Someone without a pulse, respirations, and brain activity is dead.

(09-30-2015, 06:23 PM)Brownshoe Wrote: So how does this change when someone is dead? To me it just seems like we aren't changing when someone is dead, but just reviving someone from death.

Death is the state of being dead.  Emphasis on dead.

[GMDino]

(09-30-2015, 05:59 PM)Brownshoe Wrote: And that picture does what other than prove my point?

It shows that the point of death can be moved...and changed.

[Brownshoe]

(09-30-2015, 07:48 PM)GMDino Wrote: It shows that the point of death can be moved...and changed.

How does reviving someone moving the point of death?

[oncemoreuntothejimbreech]

(09-30-2015, 08:09 PM)Brownshoe Wrote: How does reviving someone moving the point of death?

We can keep someone on life support with a pulse and respirations, but if the EEG shows limited or no brain activity then they are dead.  Technology allows us to keep their heart and lungs working, hemodialysis can allow us to maintain kidney function, thus keeping their body alive when it would otherwise be dead.  While the EEG allows us to determine they are dead despite continued respirations and pulse which have been the traditional way to determine death before technological advances.

If someone doesn't have a pulse, respirations, and brain activity they are dead.  In rare cases of heroic medical treatment, some people who are clinically (and legally) dead can be revived back to life.  For example, young children who have been drowned in freezing cold water for hours.  Thus the phrase "they're not dead until they're warm and dead."

[Brownshoe]

(09-30-2015, 08:24 PM)oncemoreuntothejimbreech Wrote: We can keep someone on life support with a pulse and respirations, but if the EEG shows limited or no brain activity then they are dead.  Technology allows us to keep their heart and lungs working, hemodialysis can allow us to maintain kidney function, thus keeping their body alive when it would otherwise be dead.  While the EEG allows us to determine they are dead despite continued respirations and pulse which have been the traditional way to determine death before technological advances.

If someone doesn't have a pulse, respirations, and brain activity they are dead.  In rare cases of heroic medical treatment, some people who are clinically (and legally) dead can be revived back to life.  For example, young children who have been drowned in freezing cold water for hours.  Thus the phrase "they're not dead until they're warm and dead."

Keeping them alive is different than determining if they're dead.

[oncemoreuntothejimbreech]

(09-30-2015, 10:26 PM)Brownshoe Wrote: Keeping them alive is different than determining if they're dead.

I know keeping them alive is different than determining if they are dead.   You were discussing moving the point of death. Now it is determining death. Can you please disagree with the same thing consistently?

I explained we can artificially keep their body alive, but determine they are dead with an EEG to measure their brain activity even with a pulse and respirations.   This is an example of using technology to move the point of death. Because with the traditional pulse and respirations they are alive, but with the EEG they are dead.

Using life support also moves the point of death because without the life support nature would take its course and they would die.

I'm starting to get the feeling I could explain this 1001 different ways and you wouldn't concede the point that technology has in fact moved the point of death.

[GodHatesBengals]

oncemoreuntothejimbreech Wrote:I'm starting to get the feeling I could explain this 1001 different ways and you wouldn't concede the point that technology has in fact moved the point of death.

It's nothing new. Right-wingers just throw out (bad) science as a ruse to justify their preconceived (bad) "philosophy"; which is actually not even philosophy and more like "gut feelings to live by".

[Naranja Tigre]

(09-30-2015, 01:20 PM)oncemoreuntothejimbreech Wrote: I thought I made it clear laws, courts, judges, and juries are part of the judicial branch of government.

Try to think more abstractly. Are people found guilty by the government?

[Brownshoe]

(10-01-2015, 12:01 AM)oncemoreuntothejimbreech Wrote: I know keeping them alive is different than determining if they are dead.   You were discussing moving the point of death. Now it is determining death. Can you please disagree with the same thing consistently?

I explained we can artificially keep their body alive, but determine they are dead with an EEG to measure their brain activity even with a pulse and respirations.   This is an example of using technology to move the point of death. Because with the traditional pulse and respirations they are alive, but with the EEG they are dead.

Using life support also moves the point of death because without the life support nature would take its course and they would die.

I'm starting to get the feeling I could explain this 1001 different ways and you wouldn't concede the point that technology has in fact moved the point of death.

Keeping them alive longer isn't moving the point of death. The point of death is when brainwaves, heartbeat, ect is gone is it not? Technology can't move that point back. It can make it harder to die, but it doesn't move the point back.

[Naranja Tigre]

Just because a fetus can't live without it's mother doesn't change whether it is human life or not. ALL life has stages, those stages do not change what that life IS, or what nature has intended for that life to become.

A cicada lives underground for 17 years and then becomes the crazy looking giant fly nature intended it be. A zygote becomes a fetus, becomes a baby in utero, and if it's not aborted it will be born and at that point, no amount of your creepy rationalization can change what it has become.

Argue on behalf of the mother, that argument at least makes sense. Don't argue that the beginnings of human life are not human.

[Naranja Tigre]

(09-29-2015, 06:24 PM)GodHatesBengals Wrote: Only unconscious blobs matter, not stupid born women.

Those stupid women are lucky they were born, right? Coulda been aborted

[GodHatesBengals]

(10-01-2015, 01:34 AM)Naranja Tigre Wrote: Those stupid women are lucky they were born, right? Coulda been aborted

Yeah, but if that would have happened, the religious right wouldn't have anybody (other than children) to keep in "subjection" per the Bible's instructions, and therefore would have to confront their inadequacies instead of project them onto females.

No wonder you're all against abortion. What's the fun in life without having a whole class of people to denigrate, insult, exploit and control?

[Brownshoe]

(10-01-2015, 02:40 AM)GodHatesBengals Wrote: Yeah, but if that would have happened, the religious right wouldn't have anybody (other than children) to keep in "subjection" per the Bible's instructions, and therefore would have to confront their inadequacies instead of project them onto females.

No wonder you're all against abortion. What's the fun in life without having a whole class of people to denigrate, insult, exploit and control?

Nice strawman you got there.

[GodHatesBengals]

(10-01-2015, 03:15 AM)Brownshoe Wrote: Nice strawman you got there.

Right. Since that post was clearly structured as a formal logical argument, I'm glad you had the foresight to search it for fallacies. Please continue to use your skills to debunk clearly facetious responses to stupid posts by right-wingers.

[SteelCitySouth]

(10-01-2015, 01:34 AM)Naranja Tigre Wrote: Those stupid women are lucky they were born, right? Coulda been aborted

Given faaaaaar more people around the world are born rather than aborted I'm guessing luck had very little to do with it.