> I don't know 100% it seems to me that there's room to discuss how a "chimeric" transplant could symbolically be that.
Anything that tampers with nature taking its course on its own could be an abomination. Like putting blood from another being into an infant and hooking them up to crazy machines and causing pain to the infant to save their life.
Of course, any failure to save someone's life which is readily saved could also be an abomination.
It all comes down to what one weighs as important.
> even where strict religious dietary laws are not at play.
Most strict dietary laws would allow one to eat the item, or have it put into your body, to survive. The systems with these doctrines largely have exceptions for literally millennia, because we understand that people being able to choose to live trumps artificial restrictions. (Indeed, some reach further to say that extending ones life in violation of these laws is not just permissible, but a duty).
> Determined on a very personal level, not something I can prescribe here and now.
It's fair to say "eh, I've had a good run-- why go further?" I've argued as such here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29432560 One's religious views are even a reasonable way to weigh things.
But I do think that once you reach beyond, to say that readily available care that has become routinely used to extend life (like a pacemaker) might be far outside of God's will and that this is a reasonable reason to reject it in itself-- and we can hardly ask God what He wants-- I think the argument becomes dubious.
That is, dying in infancy was the norm throughout human history. The interventions we have tamper with that outcome more than anything else. And at this point implanting a pacemaker is an outpatient procedure and on the low-scale of the medical intervention ladder.