Are We Viable?

So far, the Supreme Court has only applied their viability theories to the unborn. What if the Supreme Court start applying viability to the rest of us? What would our society be like? We would be in a society where the very old, the very young, the very sick, and the handicapped all might be classified as non-viable. Anybody who is weak, needy, or helpless could conceivably be classified as unable to survive on their own.

The idea of applying the viability doctrine to everybody appalls us, of course. We do not want doctors walking through a hospital and marking down the non-viables and scheduling them for termination in a procedure. The only reason the Supreme Court created a viability doctrine in the first place is because the unborn are the only people it is inflicted upon. It is the status of the unborn as legal objects that paves the way for our callous and cruel discussion of how weak they are.