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Comment by lax4ever | Hacker News Reader

That still doesn't answer why killing the child is acceptable.

It does: the primacy is that a person always has the choice to cease providing metabolic support of another person. If you take this as primacy then consequential death as a side effect of exercising that choice is killing, for sure, but a distinct category of killing with regards to culpability. Analogies fail: abortion is a unique form of killing by ending internal biologically bound sacrificial life support, so it’s best to not reach for analogs.

I would say for full consistency with this it would imply abortion providers ought to take steps to not directly inflict harm, but practically speaking death is assured under this framework and so perhaps that falls onto questions of suffering vs painless death.

Edit: To be more direct, the killing is considered acceptable since the alternative is less acceptable: namely, that a person who is providing biologically, metabolically bound life support to another via an umbilical cord is not permitted to cut that cord of their own agency, under penalty of law.

That's an incredibly narrow definition of metabolic support. Providing food for children is also a form of metabolic support and it is certainly not acceptable to just stop feeding your children. That also discards the idea that there is another life in the balance here that has committed no crime that would be considered on the level of forfeiture of life and thus has as much right to life as the mother does.

I invented the term internal sacrificial biologically bound metabolic support in an attempt to describe the exact nature of the very specific fixed connection of a umbilical cord. Adjust the terminology to your liking, but anything short of a direct analog of a fixed, biological structure connecting the two persons in a host/dependent situation in which an act of agency would be necessary to sever it won’t be useful for the point of argument. I don’t know of any useful analog so this is why I think arguments around abortion should be had on their own terms without trying to draw on analogies.

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