atheism and children

[Catholic_Lady]

What I believe is that if someone is coming after you with a knife, for example, and you can stop them by knocking them out, or running away and calling the cops, you should do that. But if the situation is such that the only way you can stop them from killing you is by shooting them, if your shot kills them, I don't think that's immoral on your part. Though it should be the absolute last resort. But yes, the idea is to always try to preserve life.

Well, it seems like what you're saying is that you should pursue your goal (saving your own life) with the least amount of harm to all parties (knocking them out, running away, calling the cops, etc.).  But when it comes to ectopic pregnancies, you say that the woman should avoid the intervention that does the least amount of harm to herself (the medical approach of taking pills that would directly abort the embryo in her Fallopian tube) in favor of the more invasive surgical option and all because you must avoid directly aborting the embryo... for some reason...

That makes no sense to me.

If the end result of either approach is the unavoidable termination of a pregnancy, then, to me, the best choice of how to proceed would be the least invasive procedure one could do with the fewest side effects and the lowest chance of complications to the only one who has a chance of surviving the procedure, the mother, and in at least some cases of ectopic pregnancy, that approach would be medical intervention.

I think you're having a hard time understanding my views on this because you're not seeing "an embryo" as a human being. You have to understand that I do. So let's take a five year old, for example (whom I'm sure you see as human), and let's say I was his mother. If the both of us got captured by terrorists and as a means to torture me, they held a gun to my head and said "either you kill your five year old, or you both will die." Would it be moral for me to do it? Is it moral to directly kill one innocent person in order to save another?

I don't think it is. If I killed my son, I would still have committed an immoral act. I'm sure my culpability/moral guilt would be mitigated considering the extremely difficult position I am in, but as an act itself, it is still an immoral act. And my son's fate would be the same whether I murdered him, or whether I didn't murder him and we both got killed, he would still end up dead. But at least I was not committing an immoral act, and I wouldn't have blood on my hands.