(September 6, 2012 at 6:01 pm)festive1 Wrote: That's fair, but still problematic. For instance the family is poor and has no health insurance, should their infant receive less care? Who pays for the multi-million dollar NICU bill? Is it even moral or ethical to put the infant through months of intensive treatment? What about the child's future medical bills? What about a family that can't shell out $5-10k for IVF to get pregnant, should they just have to face the fact that they'll never have kids (adoption isn't cheap either)? Is that moral or ethical (assuming that the family could provide a decent home, but just can't scrape together the cash)?
I'm not trying to be obnoxious, I'm attempting to explore these issues to figure out where I stand on them, but there are a lot of tough questions that don't get to be asked very often.
Are we still talking about abortion here? These questions don't seem to be about morality but about facts of life. The child would receive care and treatment proportionally to what his parents could afford. The same facts apply to adults. If you don't have enough money for IVF or adoption, then you can't have children.
I don't see morality being an issue here at all. What you have described here is natural course of events. Children die in their infancy. Or possibly live painful lives. And couples who want to have children often can't. Maybe it's not fair, but that's life for you.
The good news is, you don't have to sit back and let nature take its course. The bad news, any alteration in nature's course would come at a cost - maybe a very high cost. The question of morality comes in when you weigh the benefit of the alteration against the cost. So, for example, if you really love that child, then really, there is no amount you should not be willing to pay to ensure its survival. The same goes for the question of having children. Ofcourse, if the price is so high that you cannot pay for it, then the question of choice - and therefore any morality - is out of your hands.