Killing babies no different from abortion?

[sandwiches]

www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9113394/Killing-babies-no-different-from-abortion-experts-say.html

Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say

Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are “morally irrelevent” 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”.

[Mike D]

On their definition of what constitutes a person, then it seems there are probably many inconvenient people we could remove by having them killed, given that only those whom they define as people have a moral right to life. And we don't even need to call it euthanasia - we can get rid of those with dementia and the like and call it 'extreme post hoc abortion'.

[joel]

I'm only slightly shocked by this, since it's exactly what Peter Singer has been arguing for years (I can't believe OUP picked him to write the "Very Short Introduction" to Marxism!)

[sandwiches]

Well, it's not as if babies are dolphins?:

www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/21/whales-dolphins-legal-rights


Campaigners who believe that dolphins and whales should be granted rights on account of their intelligence are to push for the animals to be protected under international law.

A group of scientists and ethicists argues there is sufficient evidence of the marine mammals' intelligence, self-awareness and complex behaviour to enshrine their rights in legislation.

Under the declaration of rights for cetaceans, a term that includes dolphins, whales and porpoises, the animals would be protected as "non-human persons" and have a legally enforceable right to life.

If incorporated into law, the declaration would bring legal force to bear on whale hunters, and marine parks, aquariums and other entertainment venues would be barred from keeping dolphins, whales or porpoises in captivity.

"We're saying the science has shown that individuality, consciousness and self-awareness are no longer unique human properties. That poses all kinds of challenges," said Tom White, director of the Centre for Ethics and Business at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

"Dolphins are non-human persons. A person needs to be an individual. And if individuals count, then the deliberate killing of individuals of this sort is ethically the equivalent of deliberately killing a human being. The captivity of beings of this sort, particularly in conditions that would not allow for a decent life, is ethically unacceptable, and commercial whaling is ethically unacceptable," White said.

The group spoke at the annual meeting in Vancouver of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to raise support for the declaration among scientists and the visiting public. The 10-point declaration sets out a framework to protect cetaceans' "life, liberty and wellbeing", including rights to freedom of movement and residence in their natural environment, and protection against "disruption of their cultures".

Western Society's values are going a bit awry?

[sandwiches]

Apparently uncovered by the Catholic Herald:

www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2012/02/29/ethicists-call-for-killing-of-newborns-to-be-made-legal/

Lord Alton, co-chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Pro-Life Group, said that infanticide was the “chilling and unassailable” logical step for a society that permits killing a baby one day before birth.

He said: “That the Journal of Medical Ethics should give space to such a proposition illustrates not a slippery slope, but the quagmire into which medical ethics and our wider society have been sucked.

“Personal choice has eclipsed the sacredness, or otherness, of life itself. It is profoundly disturbing, indeed shocking, to see the way in which opinion-formers within the medical profession have ditched the traditional belief of the healer to uphold the sanctity of human life for this impoverished and inhumane defence of child destruction.

“It has been said that a country which kills its own children has no future. That’s true. And a country which accepts infanticide or the killing of a little girl or a little boy because of their gender, the killing of a baby because of a disability, or the killing of a child because it is inconvenient, the wrong shape, or the wrong colour, also forfeits its right to call itself civilised.”

But Julian Savulescu, the editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, has defended the publication of the paper on the British Medical Journal website. He said: “What is disturbing is not the arguments in this paper nor its publication in an ethics journal. It is the hostile, abusive, threatening responses that it has elicited. More than ever, proper academic discussion and freedom are under threat from fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society.”

He continued: “As Editor of the Journal, I would like to defend its publication. The arguments presented, in fact, are largely not new and have been presented repeatedly in the academic literature and public fora by the most eminent philosophers and bioethicists in the world, including Peter Singer, Michael Tooley and John Harris in defence of infanticide, which the authors call after-birth abortion.

“The novel contribution of this paper is not an argument in favour of infanticide – the paper repeats the arguments made famous by Tooley and Singer – but rather their application in consideration of maternal and family interests. The paper also draws attention to the fact that infanticide is practised in the Netherlands."

[fortigurn]

Feb 29, 2012 16:28:20 GMT joel said:

I'm only slightly shocked by this, since it's exactly what Peter Singer has been arguing for years (I can't believe OUP picked him to write the "Very Short Introduction" to Marxism!)

Yeah, Singer's a classic.

[endrefodstad]

And he is (not surprisingly) on the article reference list.

[eckadimmock]

What about teenagers who are only capable of rolling eyes and texting?

[turoldus]

Tariq Moosa sides with the authors of the article. For the record he is also ok with incest and necrophilia.

[sandwiches]

Well I agree with his point here:

"... against this tide of outrage, thuggish behaviour, bullying and threats, I want to express my support and defence of Giubilini and Minerva for being able to write, publish and think what they want."

But presumably he therefore would agree with this point:

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2012/feb/29/infanticide-repellent-killing-newborns


Savulescu claims that he and the authors have received death threats. In his blogpost he wrote:

"What is disturbing is not the arguments in this paper nor its publication in an ethics journal. It is the hostile, abusive, threatening responses that it has elicited. More than ever, proper academic discussion and freedom are under threat from fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society."

You have to wonder whether this is intended as self-parody.

If "the very values of a liberal society" include killing inconvenient babies, or discussing their killing as if this was something reasonable and morally competent human beings might choose to do, then liberalism really would be the monster that American conservatives pretend it is. Academics are and should be free to entertain monstrous ideas. But that does not trump the freedom of the rest of us to be repelled by their monstrosity.

An interesting point from the same article in The Guardian:


It certainly seems to follow from Giubilini and Minerva's reasoning that there is nothing wrong with sex-selective infanticide. There's no doubt that having a child of the wrong sex can be frightfully inconvenient for its parents. So if it's all right to abort a girl for her chromosomes, why not kill the newborns as well?

This question is not addressed in the article.

This goes back to Pre-Christian Society in The West?:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide#Greece_and_Rome

The practice was prevalent in ancient Rome, as well. Philo was the first philosopher to speak out against it.A letter from a Roman citizen to his wife, dating from 1 BCE, demonstrates the casual nature with which infanticide was often viewed:

"I am still in Alexandria. ... I beg and plead with you to take care of our little child, and as soon as we receive wages, I will send them to you. In the meantime, if (good fortune to you!) you give birth, if it is a boy, let it live; if it is a girl, expose it."