By today's standards in most countries where abortion is legal, the male progenitor has no say in the matter. The only person who can decide it is the woman and that's because she's carrying the baby inside her body. Someone who'd force a woman to abort, by say making her take an aborting pill, would be charged with a felony. This means that Riker had no right to end his clone's life no matter how unfinished the latter might have been.
Dear Doctor Revisited
- Thread starter Mutai Sho-Rin
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By today's standards in most countries where abortion is legal, the male progenitor has no say in the matter. The only person who can decide it is the woman and that's because she's carrying the baby inside her body. Someone who'd force a woman to abort, by say making her take an aborting pill, would be charged with a felony. This means that Riker had no right to end his clone's life no matter how unfinished the latter might have been.
Notably there is no female reproductive partner in the cloning whatsoever, just a machine. As such, any issues of reproductive rights are completely irrelevant. The clone can thus be considered to be more like a fertilized embryo in which case the destruction of that material has been settled by court law as something that both partners can have destroyed rather than used.
Which is to say its not murder if there's no inner life yet.
I don't know. This clone stuff to tell you the truth is a bit stupid. If a real clone was grown this way, it would be alive every step of the way and thus a crime to end it at any stage. Just as if someone brutalizes a pregnant woman and causes her to lose her baby that someone will be charged with murder even if the baby/fetus is only a few weeks old. That's the law even in countries where abortion is legal and common.
Unless it, again, has no inner life and needs to be "activated." It was growing but if it never has any brain activity, it's not alive, just a set of materials waiting to have memories and skills uploaded into it (as an adult clone would have to have). The comparison to a pregnant woman being beaten is also bizarre because it's explicitly being assembled in a machine.
The fact that the clone is grown without causing Riker any inconvenience (other than some barbaric sense of entitlement) removes any excuses he would have for ending his life. As for the idea of an inactivated clone. That's something that has no basis in reality. To me, it's like saying that the clone was turned into a real boy like Pinocchio from a wooden mannequin. It's not sci. fi. it's a fairy tale. that's another reason why I don't like this episode, a clone that is fully grown (it had already reached its adult size) but inactivated is IMO, pure nonsense.
I've long felt that in the case of Riker killing those clones, a more apt comparison than abortion would be the ethics of end-of-life treatment and stopping life support in cases of brain death, as these clones were clearly just brain-dead lumps of biological material. There are laws that specifically address life support for brain-dead patients, and of course ethics and law don't always line up.
Kor
Kor
As we see with the fact they're being grown to adults rather than children, they are clearly being made assembly style not through organic growth. For me, the issue is, "Is the brain active?"
We have no sign it is.
Or isn't.
But I think that would be where I'd determine if it was a lifeform yet.
Speak for yourself: I certainly never accepted it. That was horrible science, which was a problem because the plot was dependent on it. It was the second episode of Voyager (counting the extra length pilot as 1 episode), and right out of the gate it was warning us how bad the "science" in the show would be. I would have accepted it if it was a made up spatial anomaly of the week, but by using an actual object we know things about and then ignoring what we know, it really took me out of the story.
Well, you can't expect two completely different species to interbreed. Just ask Spock, Kehlar, B'ellana, Naomi...