Reply #33: If you don't think life depends upon brain function..

[Princess Turandot]

does this mean that you think that Jesus came to redeem all other species on the earth? It seems to me that could be one interpretation of your statement. We are human because we have highly developed cerebral cortexes. It not only separates us from other animals from an ability perspective, but it also puts humans in the unique position to know right from wrong, and have views on all of the moral things which get bandied about in this group. To say that human life has nothing to do with its higher order brain says that we are no different than our evolutionary cousins, the Great Apes. That makes no sense.

I do not believe that the evaluation of life from a review of brain wave function is a slippery slope. It has been going on for decades, and whatever potential evil some folks think this case can stir up, doesn't seem to have appeared in all of that time. Go visit a ventilator ward at a nursing home, even a Catholic one. You will see lines of beds with mostly elderly comatose people who lay there unconscious on vents because a relative chose to to put them on life support, or no relative or DNR was present, so the hospital had no choice but to put them on life support. (This is in NYS; laws may vary elsewhere.) My mother was in a Catholic nursing home for over a year with one of those wards on her floor. I never saw anyone visiting these patients. They lay there until some organ fails and they die. Medicaid, rather than the Church foots their bills. No one rushes in to turn off these folks ventilators. They are alive in the sense that there are higher brain waves recorded for them but do not have working brain stems, so they cannot breath on their own. No one is rushing to take them off of ventilators, but whether there is any dignity to their lives at that point is very questionable.