Poll: Your child is born without a brain. Would you raise it regardless?

[beastro]

A terrible position to be placed in and horrible moral situation, but no one is home up there, it's just a body.

But it comes down to no one being harmed. While I can disagree with the woman keeping the child, I'll never be in her position and she isn't harming anyone (besides herself if you argue it a certain way).

With that said, I find the flippant comments here quite disturbing, especially the short ones that were most likely given without much thought.

 

[Mack Case]

assuming the child somehow survived, it would only bring depression to the family, as a constant reminder of the child they have that isn't really alive. it would probably be one of the most depressing things a person could go through short of having a child born healthy and then die. I think it would be better for the parents to be without it, although, I feel I must object to the turn of phrase used in the poll "kill it" just sounds so brutal.

 

[invadergir]

This "child" is not being kept alive for its own sake, its sitting there devouring resources to appease the judging eyes of an idiot society and placate a mother who could very well hate it but literally cannot bring herself to overcome her impulse to care. That said, as a male I would recommend abortion/letting it die and then likely flee if the mother carried it to term. Paying for a child is one thing, but I'd like to think I'd not pay to maintain a breathing corpse

You're essentially saying "It's only alive because the mother loves it, and she's dumb because she should be heartless and euthanize her baby!"

No matter how you put it, it would still be your child.

And trust me, it's easy to say "as a male I would just get the female to have an abortion and then walk out on her", however unless you're a really empty, heartless bastard (which you're not, no matter how hard you might pretend to be one), you won't walk out.

A lot of people in this thread don't seem to understand that it's easy for them to say "it's not aware of anything, I'd just throw it out like a broken toy", but if you think about things for more than a second, it wouldn't be an easy thing for you to do if you were in the situation.

The hypothetical I stated earlier about the brain cancer patient with no hope, happened to me a few months ago. I had to make the decision whether or not to prolong my mothers agony after she slipped into a comma.

So yes, I can and have had to make that choice.

 

[Skeleon]

If you have a strong stomach, look up anencephaly. No. "Kill it" seems somewhat off, considering - the moment it was known - I'd try to ensure it's never born (unless you are in the abortion = murder crowd, I guess). I'd want to spare it and ourselves the pointless additional suffering.

 

[TheDoctor455]

I'm really curious about how that kid lived. Was he basically like someone who's suffered brain damage, so they have no brain function at all and sit there? Because he was moving around and blinking, so I'm really not sure of what the consequences of having no brain would be.

If he was just a body, with no personality or emotions or anything like that, I wouldn't keep him. I don't think I could bring myself to kill an already born baby even if it has no brain, but I wouldn't want to take care of just a physical body.

Umm...

literally having no brain = DEAD.

Everything about the body (including the order that it'll shut itself off in) is geared towards keeping the brain alive.

So if there is literally no brain in there... you don't have a baby there. You have a tiny corpse.

It's a tiny living corpse though, which is really weird. You saw in the video, it moved around and was definitely alive. I don't knnow how that's even possible, the brain controls organ function doesn't it? I have no idea how that baby survived for 3 years.

Because they're exaggerating in the video when they say it has no brain. At most, only the parts of the brain that control lower, automatic functions like respiration are functional. But, is that really alive? Some shows and movies depict zombies that way.

 

[Chedderwolf]

I would put it down. I would feel like a monster to allow it to live. Simply because that is no life, just existing without awareness or feeling. I would most likely also develop a phobia of attempting to have another child.

 

[Spakka]

Umm... Just no.
The baby does have a brain - the brainstem. This is very primitive, and responsible for most of the things that keep you alive - e.g. breathing. It's just the rest is missing. True death = brainstem death.

According to your definition of life, the pump I use for my camping bed is alive....

The normal definition is being a self-sustaining organism and having conciousness. A body without a brain has no conciousness.

Sadly no that is not the normal definition. Consciousness has nothing to do with life, are you seriously trying to say that all plants are in fact dead? How about individual cells? They don't have consciousness but they're alive.
Furthermore barely any organisms are self sustaining. E.g. humans need the bacteria that live in/on us to survive naturally. In fact there are more bacteria in you than human cells.





Either way anencephaly is a condition that creates non-viability of life, frankly I'm pretty sure the doctors are confused as hell as to how this poor child survived. The body often spontaneously aborts severe congenital conditions such as this, or they are simply stillborn.
I did a quick medical literature search, one study had 40% spontaneously miscarry, 60% were born alive, but had a mean survival of 51 minutes.

In the UK I believe most paediatricians would think that this child should not have invasive care but be allowed to pass away naturally.

 

[Angie7F]

I would let it die. It seems like a waste of time and money to invest in an offspring that would not pay back to the society as a part of the workforce when it gets older.

I believe in letting anything that needs special support to survive to be left alone to die naturally.

 

[karamazovnew]

One thing is for sure, that little kid had a great family. No matter what we babble about here, the mother did the best any human could and she deserves praise for that. As for the kid... I don't see much difference between him and any newborn. We're all pooping machines and we can't remember anything before the age of 3. Sure, we live on, but 99% of us will amount to less than he being able to survive 3 years like that. In my eyes, we are only really aware of our own existence, other people are just reflections of our thoughts, the sum of our shared experience, filtered by our own empathy. This child caused no harm and left anyone who knew him with a warm feeling of care, simply by existing.
As for the original question... from a darwinistic point of view, I don't just want to have children. I want to have grand-grand-grand-.....-grand children that thousands of years from now will at least once in their lives stop to wonder who their ancestors were. Every time I look at a history documentary, I wonder who my ancestors were in that period, and how they survived those times to make me. And as a sole child of a sole child of a sole child, I feel a great deal of responsibility for my blood line. So I don't think I'd keep any baby that is not able live a normal life and continue that line.

 

[DracoSuave]

whilst i find it a little disturbing that people are referring to the person as "it" rather than "him" or "her" i have to say that letting such an individual die is possibly the most humane thing possible, if i had a choice between dying peacefully or spending the rest of my days as a husk id choose the first option. as Creator002 has already said "that's not a life. It's an existence."

The thing is, there's no person there. There's no cognition, no emotion, no ability whatsoever to be anything that defines a person on any level.

You have a sack of meat shaped like a human. Horrifying as that thought is, it's the truth.

It is alive, but it there's no 'individual' there. Everything that defines oneself AS a self is absent.

 

[Insomniac55]

A lot of people in this thread don't seem to understand that it's easy for them to say "it's not aware of anything, I'd just throw it out like a broken toy", but if you think about things for more than a second, it wouldn't be an easy thing for you to do if you were in the situation.

Question: If this child has nothing but a rudimentary brain stem, and can not and WILL not ever be anything more than a living, breathing, shell in the shape of a child...

What are your thoughts on the morality of keeping it (a futile cause) alive, when its organs may save the lives of otherwise doomed babies with the potential to grow into functioning people?

I feel like it's morally wrong to keep a husk of a child alive when it has the potential to save the lives of people with the capacity to be *aware*.


I don't mean to suggest the disabled should be euthanised to save those with more 'potential'. But even severely brain damaged humans have *some* ability to think, to feel. This isn't a case of a fuzzy line between those who have a right to live and those who don't. This child shaped thing lacks everything it means to be a person. It's only a human being in the vaguest sense.



Emotions always get in the way, but objectively speaking it should have been declared some equivalent of brain-dead and had its organs removed. Lives could have been saved.

 

[MammothBlade]

No. Down Syndrome, okay, I might consider it. This case, not at all. I want to raise a human being, not a vegetable. That may be offensive to some, but it's a waste of time and energy to raise a child that's never going to reach a level of cognition, let alone independence.