I wonder if by let's say maybe age 5 if it is determined that a child has the physical disability of parapalegia, that perhaps euthanasia would be fair. I do like to believe that most less than average medical conditions can be tended to for healing in holistic manner, as I like to believe average trying conditions are tendable to, to achieve healthful status. Parapalegia is one of the more intense physical burdens..does anyone else think that euthanasia for the condition of parapalegia is perhaps an ethical o.k.?
Who in their right mind would ever kill a 5 yr old for any reason whatsoever? Paraplegia can be remediated through robotic limbs and devices. Speaking of devices, maybe you can ask Stephen Hawking that question, or any of the countless folks who have benefited by his struggle to overcome his illness and disability.
I'd think it would be more prudent to determine any medical problems before the baby is born and either abort the baby or fix the problem while the baby is still being developed. To give birth to children that you know are going to have a life of suffering shouldn't be allowed to happen for both the parents and the child. I realize that many will disagree with me but if the parents at least have the opportunity to understand what lies in store for them and their child then they might be willing to abort the child so as not to burden the child or themselves with a short life full of misery.
We have a close friends the lady was pregnant and the medical advise was to terminate the pregnancy because some ultrasound observation an some amnion fluid analysis. She been a devoted Catholic disagreed with the physician recommendation, the boy was born , a healthy boy , now he is 18 years old . My point is we don't have good analysis at the present.
I don't disagree with you in principle. We abort fetuses with major defects. But we focus on defects that will result in a baby being born with such overwhelming abnormalities that he would barely qualify as a "person" (such as major brain defects) or that he would have a very short life full of agony (such as missing organs). But you're talking about paraplegia??? This is the 21st century, dude! We spend most of our life sitting down! An ever-increasing segment of the population perform their "work" on a computer, and have to be reminded to get up and walk around once or twice an hour to keep their bodies healthy. Being a paraplegic is not a major impediment to being a productive, fulfilled member of society. Most of the things the average person does in an average day are not significantly impeded by the inability to walk. Help for the walking-impaired is light-years beyond its status when I was a kid in the 1950s, and my paraplegic friend needed somebody to push his wheelchair from one classroom to the next and then into the parking lot at the end of the day. Even then, they made a big game out of it: the pusher would get it going really fast down a long, deserted hallway, and then hop on the rails and ride to the end. Sure there were a few crashes, but the rest of us were out on the playground being hit in the head by baseballs and falling off of the monkey bars! Today my adult paraplegic friend (not the same person, I don't know what happened to that kid) can ride his electric wheelchair down a ramp from his house into his garage, get into his car and stow the wheelchair with absolutely no help and then drive to work with the hand controls. Once he's at work he sits in front of his computer all day--just like the rest of us! Yes, when you see a man with no impediments suddenly becoming a paraplegic, you feel sorry for him because the change is so hard on him. But people who were born that way have nothing to miss! If you're born without hands, well that's a much bigger problem. Still, there are lots of people who have learned to do everything with their feet, even eating and painting pictures. As I said at the start, I agree with you in principle, feeling sympathy and pity for someone with a seriously degraded quality of life. But we have to be careful how we judge that quality. The fact that you haven't even given a single thought to the millions of paraplegic people out there who live perfectly happy, productive, fulfilling lives, is rather scary! It certainly shows how difficult it is for one person to make decisions for another. This is why our legal system does not allow euthanasia for any reason at all. Each of us can only imagine how we would feel if we woke up one morning with the other person's affliction. We have no idea how the other person feels about it. How common is it for handicapped people to commit suicide? Have you even tried to find the statistics on this? Before you start pontificating, wouldn't it be wise to gather all the information available on the subject? Have you even interviewed just one paraplegic to find out how he feels? I have. He's happy.
You are on the horns of a proverbial dilemma. First you must understand that the ethical question is immaterial until the moral issue is settled. And that leads to the dilemma. The child has the right to voluntary action. So IF the child volunteers to the euthanasia, then it is moral (right) and may then be ethical (good) too. However, it is widely recognized that children of that age don't have the maturity to reliably make such a decision, so society doesn't recognize a childs decision AS voluntary. So, having no access to a voluntary (moral) acceptance, there can be no ethical action.
I'm trying to come up with situations in which a reasonable person in circumstances of civilization would kill a five year old child on purpose, and pretty much coming up blank - maybe in the last few hours of a serious burn victim's life a nurse might add a little extra to the anesthesia, I dunno - that would be their call.
This is a philisophical question, not science. I think many disabled people go on to live happy and productive lives. As adults should they be allowed to vanish into the wilderness and die alone as some injured animals may is another question. I believe in assisted suicide in cases of suffering, but Euthanasia without consent (Legal consent would require 18 years) I would not condone, except as above poster mentioned the person was not expected to live beyond a small amount of time. This topic is not science...
Since paraplegia is about the lower half of the body , there is no reason to put the child down But I think it is possible to avoid the situation by understanding nutrition in the first place
