consistency?

[cellio]

For the last few days there has been a story in the news about a baby that was born with two heads (twins gone wrong). Or, more precisely, about the surgery that was being done to remove one of them. Some of the reported facts got me to wondering about something.

The second head had brain activity. (I understood it to be activity independent of the other brain.) The additional head had eyes, a mouth, and other features that moved and apparently reacted to environment. If the head remained it was certainly going to become a serious hardship for the child, both physically and mentally. It was not clear to me that its presence was directly life-threatening.

So, the doctors removed an entity that was developed enough to have a working brain and body parts, which was infringing on a host entity through no fault of its own, to preserve the health but not necessarily the life of said host.

Now, I have absolutely no problem with that decision. But I wonder how those who are anti-abortion see it. I did not hear of any protests outside the hospital, and I would be somewhat surprised if a significant number of anti-abortion folks actually objected to this surgery. You'd have to be pretty hard-hearted to object to this, I think.

But I wonder about the reasoning. What are the salient differences between this case and abortion that make the former acceptable and the latter not? Is it just that a suffering child tugs on the heart-strings more than a suffering adult? Or is there a real difference? The analogous abortion case would seem to be an unintended, risky pregnancy resulting in a fetus with a serious not-immediately-fatal defect, like Down's. While many anti-abortion people make exceptions for cases like that, many others do not. They're the ones I'm curious about.

Comments

Re:

[caryabend.livejournal.com]

>The second head would have prevented the complete baby's brain from
>growing. That sounds life-threatening to me.

Well, except that the baby was alive and functioning, and brains don't recede on their own. I don't get the impression that the growth of the second brain would have taken away, say, the first brain's ability to regulate breathing or heartbeat.

I don't think it was a question of receding, as much as actual physical growth of the first brain; in which the second head appeared to be a danger. I'm not a medical expert, (and I don't play one on TV) but this sounds bad. Babies' brains do get bigger as they grow, and from what I read, there would have been serious/fatal problems without the surgery.

Re:

[cellio]

Ah. That makes sense. Thanks.