Could I agree with a liberal?

In writing a paper about “pulling the plug”, I came across the following argument. The interesting thing about it is that the person making the argument is Peter Singer, the bioethicist perhaps best known for his argument that there can be animals that are persons who should be protected and that there are non-person humans that don’t deserve protection. You can tell how he makes the distinction in the following quotes. I thought these quotes were interesting, however, because I agree with the implications he draws from the belief that all life is of equal value and worth – that is, that all life should be protected and valued regardless of its state of consciousness. His point is that there can be no middle ground.

"Old Commandment: Treat all human life as of equal worth"

“Hardly anyone really believes that all human life is of equal worth. The rhetoric that flows so easily from the pens and mouths of popes, theologians, ethicists, and some doctors is belied every time these same people accept that we need not go all out to save a severely malformed baby; that we may allow an elderly man with advanced Alzheimer’s disease to die from pneumonia, untreated by antibiotics; or that we can withdraw food and water from a patient in a persistent vegetative state. When the law sticks to the letter of this commandment, it leads to what everyone agrees now is an absurdity, like Joey Fiori’s survival for almost two decades in a persistent vegetative state, or the continuation of respirator support for the anencephalic Baby K. The new approach is able to deal with these situations in the obvious way, without struggling to reconcile them with any lofty claims that all human life is of equal worth, irrespective of its potential for gaining or regaining consciousness.”

"New Commandment: Recognize that the worth of human life varies"

“This new commandment allows us frankly to acknowledge…that life without consciousness is of no worth at all.”
“The best argument for the new commandment is the sheer absurdity of the old one. If we were to take seriously the idea that all human life, irrespective of its capacity for consciousness, is equally worthy of our care and support, we would have to root out of medicine not only open quality of life judgments, but also the disguised ones. We would then be left trying to do our best to prolong indefinitely the lives of anencephalics, cortically dead infants, and patients in a persistent vegetative state. Ultimately, if we were really honest with ourselves, we would have to try to prolong the lives of those we now classify as dead because their brains have entirely ceased to function. For if human life is of equal worth, whether it has the capacity for consciousness or not, why focus on the death of the brain, rather than on the death of the body as a whole?”