The problem with your reasoning is that it puts society on a very slippery slope. The next step is to start euthanizing the elderly when they become infirmed on the theory that they are a waste of resources. And the paralyzed, it costs millions to treat someone for a spinal cord injury.
Once society accepts the premise that some lives are more valuable than others there’s no stopping it.
Actually, it’s two criteria for medical care, and it has been used successfully before. The idea is to compile a long list of medical procedures. At the top of the list are the least expensive and most successful procedures, for example, cleft palate surgery. Easy, cheap and remarkably improves the life of its recipient.
At the bottom of the list are egregiously expensive procedures that never, or only very rarely, work. And even then their outcomes as likely as not just prolong suffering.
It was found out that by eliminating just a few of these useless efforts that consumed vast amounts of resources, the quality of medical care jumps for everyone else.
And while people truly enjoy rooting for “lost causes”, in this case you have to ask yourself, is trying to save someone’s forfeit life through “Deux ex machina” (God from a machine) worth impairing, tormenting, and killing a hundred other people?
Today, with all that we can do with modern medicine, one in four pregnancies still ends in a natural miscarriage. The agonizing grief felt by countless women and their husbands in this is indescribable. But we are generally powerless to stop it, and can only rationalize it by saying that the fetus was just not meant to live, as it did not have the ability to sustain itself into birth.
But as this death is accepted, so also we need to learn that at a particular point death will win; and though struggle against it we must, if the only way to cling to life is to increase anguish, suffering and death in others, it is too high a price to pay.
This is not to exalt the disposability of life, nor is it just the recognition that death, as well as life, needs dignity. It is the recognition that we are part of humanity, and sustaining our own lives at the expense of the lives of others is not just ghoulish, but it defies life itself.
Agreed.
Suffice (and sad) to say, I believe we may already have...