system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Should we value human life that’s hasn’t yet had a conscious experience?

I always thought that abortion was okay since the fetus was something that doesn’t have conscious experience but someone pointed out to me that people in comas also don’t have conscious experience.
gpt
The key question raised by your phrasing of the debate would be as follows: What is a human life that *hasn't* had a conscious experience at all?

A big part of the debate over abortion settles on the question of when a life becomes a life, and there are a number of different ways in which this could be defined. Almost all sides of the debate tend to agree that 'life' begins no earlier than conception and no later than birth. In other words, it makes little intuitive sense to insist that the baby is alive before the egg is fertilised, and we tend to believe that a baby is a 'life' by the time it is born. Between those two moments, there are a few ways to define 'life', and part of the challenge of using consciousness as our 'marker' is that... we honestly don't know that much about consciousness itself. We strongly believe it's closely related to the physical brain, but outside of that we don't completely know, so we tend to lean on this fact when deciding the latest point at which the foetus can be aborted.

There is an obvious difference between the person in a a coma and the non-yet conscious foetus, and that's that we know that the person in a coma does appear to have had a conscious experience prior to their coma, so we can reasonably assume they are capable of having one (current condition notwithstanding). But is this a philosophically-meaningful difference?

Perhaps. The truth is that there probably isn't as much of a difference as it might appear. In both cases, there are situations in which we might consider ending a life; in the case of the coma patient, there are situations in which we would consider ending their life if there is no possibility of them regaining consciousness ever again. Similarly, there are many situations in which parents make a sad but unavoidable decision to terminate a pregnancy. In both cases, human life is clearly valued, but is balanced against other factors that affect the quality-of-life of the subject and those around them.