Christianity & Bioethics: Confronting Clinical Issues (Biblia.com)

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Medical technology and new treatments are being discovered and promoted at a much faster rate than our ability to reflect on their ethical, social, legal, and religious implications. As a result, people are often unprepared to answer the difficult questions that confront them today:—Is abortion ever justifiable?—If a loved one is suffering, can we take action that might relieve their suffering...

Tooley calls this the self-consciousness requirement. Since infants do not have a self-concept or are not self-conscious they are not persons and therefore there is no moral requirement to treat them. Tristram Englehardt is another who argues that the infant is not really a person, though for a different reason. Children are not persons in the “strict” sense because they are not adults. Therefore they have no moral rights. He writes: Adults belong to themselves in the sense that they are rational

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