Throwing down the gauntlet

By Chuck aka XtnYoda

This coming out of the Journal of Medical Ethics?

Killing babies no different from abortion:

Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are “morally irrelevant” and ending their lives is no different to abortion, a group of medical ethicists linked to Oxford University has argued.

The article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.

The journal’s editor, Prof Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, said the article's authors had received death threats since publishing the article. He said those who made abusive and threatening posts about the study were “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society”.

The article, entitled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?”, was written by two of Prof Savulescu’s former associates, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva.

They argued: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”

Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”. They explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.

“We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.”

As such they argued it was “not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to become a person in the morally relevant sense”.

The authors therefore concluded that “what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled”.

They also argued that parents should be able to have the baby killed if it turned out to be disabled without their knowing before birth, for example citing that “only the 64 per cent of Down’s syndrome cases” in Europe are diagnosed by prenatal testing.

Once such children were born there was “no choice for the parents but to keep the child”, they wrote.

“To bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care.”

However, they did not argue that some baby killings were more justifiable than others – their fundamental point was that, morally, there was no difference to abortion as already practised.

They preferred to use the phrase “after-birth abortion” rather than “infanticide” to “emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus”. .....

One would really need to go read the entire report in the Telegraph and the article itself.  We've been hearing rumblings that we were headed this direction and it is now in print. They of course do some interesting things with words and ideas to reach their conclusion, trying to find some symblance of logic.  Simply stated they argue that if you don't want the baby after it is born then you should have the right to eliminate it.

Just the next step.

Thought we might need to know.

Comments

[RandomThoughts]

My God...I can't even form words about this. It reads like the worst kind of twisted amoral logic. Basically, they're claiming that the sole criteria for the right to life is that a person be old enough to recognize what death is, and to prefer to remain alive.

Is there a pit in hell deep enough for these "ethicists?"

[Marv]

Actually, this is good in the sense that they acknowledge that a newborn and a fetus are morally equivalent, thus, any non evil person must concede that a fetus has the same rights as a newborn, thus abortion is evil.

[Marv]

In addition, isn't this one of the first questions asked when debating abortion. Why stop at birth? Where do you draw the line?

Now pushing the line further out, one can only assume that we should kill people that actually are a burden to society (say the handicapped). At some point it will become required to abort these children unless you can demonstrate your ability financially to care for them (at a level the state deems appropriate).

Only a few years ago, I would have thought this kind of thing was ridiculous, but now, it could actually happen. It makes me sad and afraid.

[Locutisprime]

The Euthanasia vans with into service this week in the Netherlands. It's closer than you think.