Posted on 02/29/2012 2:25:15 PM PST by Morgana
February 28, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The editor of an ethics journal that recently published an article advocating infanticide (what the authors call “post-birth abortion”), has responded to widespread criticism by pointing out that promoting the killing of newborns is nothing new: in fact, in the Netherlands infant euthanasia is already legal and practiced.
Editor Julian Savulescu also criticizes what he calls the “hate speech” directed at the authors of the article, arguing that the public’s response to the piece shows that “proper academic discussion and freedom are under threat from fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society.”
In the journal article Alberto Giubilin, a philosopher from the University of Milan, and Francesca Minerva, an ethicist from the University of Melbourne, made the case that “after-birth abortion” should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is perfectly healthy. They base their argument on the premise that the unborn baby and the newborn do not have the moral status of actual persons and are consequently “morally irrelevant.”
Click “like” if you want to end abortion!
In response to the backlash, Savulescu wrote that the arguments in the article “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.”
He also observes that the paper “draws attention to the fact that infanticide is practised in the Netherlands.”
The fact that The Netherlands already permits the killing of disabled newborns is not widely known, even by many in the pro-life movement. The practice is permitted under the so-called Groningen Protocol, which outlines the circumstances under which a physician may deliver a lethal injection to a newborn who suffers from a disability, at the request of the child’s parents.
An article published in 2008 in the prestigious Hastings Center Report about the Protocol similarly provoked outrage after the authors argued that disabled babies might be “better off dead.”
The authors of that article also linked infanticide to legalized abortion, arguing that infanticide may in fact be the morally superior alternative to abortion.
“The supposedly morally superior alternative [of abortion]…does not strike us as superior at all,” they wrote. Instead, they said, parents of a child with a poor prenatal diagnosis should wait until the child is born, when they can make a more informed decision about the chance that their child has of living a “satisfactory” life.
“We join disability activists who condemn the routine recommendation of abortions performed for no other reason than to prevent the birth of an affected baby,” they said.
In his response today, editor Savulescu observed that the authors of the recent paper simply took for granted the premises that undergird legal abortion, and followed them to their logical conclusion.
“The goal of the Journal of Medical Ethics is not to present the Truth or promote some one moral view,” he writes. “It is to present well reasoned argument based on widely accepted premises.
“The authors provocatively argue that there is no moral difference between a fetus and a newborn,” he continues. “Their capacities are relevantly similar. If abortion is permissible, infanticide should be permissible. The authors proceed logically from premises which many people accept to a conclusion that many of those people would reject.”
The pro-infanticide article and the defense from Savulescu come only months after a Canadian judge employed similar arguments in the process of handing out a lenient sentence to a mother who strangled her newborn and threw him over a fence.
According to Justice Joanne Veit, Canada’s lack of an abortion law indicated that “while many Canadians undoubtedly view abortion as a less than ideal solution to unprotected sex and unwanted pregnancy, they generally understand, accept and sympathize with the onerous demands pregnancy and childbirth exact from mothers, especially mothers without support.”
“Naturally, Canadians are grieved by an infant’s death, especially at the hands of the infant’s mother, but Canadians also grieve for the mother,” she added.
Savluescu, the director of the Center for Practical Ethics at Oxford University, has made the news in the past for arguing that the requirement for organ donors to be dead at the time of organ harvesting should be removed, and that “mandatory” organ donation should be instituted. He has also argued that humanity has a “moral obligation” to use in vitro fertilization (IVF) to select the most intelligent embryos for the good of society.
Killing off the elderly is going to be a breeze for them. We have known from the beginning that this is the plan of the terrorist @ 1600.
"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’.
Now, my hunch is that for the vast majority of the civilized — and, frankly, uncivilized — world, the only thing these authors have demonstrated is their own “moral irrelevance.”....................
“to select the most intelligent embryos for the good of society.”
Margaret Sanger lives.
I wish it would state whether any of these so-called ethicists have ever been parents.
As sickening as this is, consider the fact that things are only going to get worse. The world is in moral freefall.
Hitler would be proud.
>Editor Julian Savulescu also criticizes what he calls the >“hate speech” directed at the authors of the article, >arguing that the public’s response to the piece shows that >“proper academic discussion and freedom are under threat >from fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal >society.”
He misunderstands. His side wants to kill helpless infants and helpless elderly people. So what is wrong with wanting to kill the adult killers? They can at least try to defend themselves. Or is helplessness a good enough reason to murder?
Maybe he just wants to kill things that can’t fight back, like stomping on kittens and puppies, because it makes him fell like a “real man”.
This is the stuff that makes me really want to hurt someone. Just how non chalantly they say things, no emotion or empathy. I work in the medical field and the hypocratic oath is to never harm patients, well I guess a living breathing infant is not a person any more.. Oh god has a really special place for these bastards.
This is the stuff that makes me really want to hurt someone. Just how non chalantly they say things, no emotion or empathy. I work in the medical field and the hypocratic oath is to never harm patients, well I guess a living breathing infant is not a person any more.. Oh god has a really special place for these bastards.
Scuse me!
It's appalling to think about how many sacrificed so much in an effort to drive the nazis out of Holland so that, in less than a single lifetime, the liberated population could reinstitute the very same policies.
But it is not practiced in the 190 other countries of the world.
The people who condemn Hitler for genocide are now “haters” I guess. The same with those who look down on comrade Stalin for mass murder. It all made logical sense at the time to the killers.
This is a “liberal” society. Just so we all know the libearls are making progress and that progress is backwards to the most hellish times on earth.
marker
Naturally, Canadians are grieved by an infant’s death, especially at the hands of the infant’s mother, but Canadians also grieve for the mother
Portraying mothers as victims leads DIRECTLY to justification of abortion.
However, the basis on which the authors consider all of these to be permissible is the crux of the matter. That is simply that the life of the human individual involved is entirely conditional on the effect that life has on the somewhat nebulous collective termed "society" - that (1) there is some sort of consensus as to what benefits society, and (2) that outside that consensus the existence of the individual may be termed invalid, and (3) proceeding on this basis, the individual's life is forfeit. It is these premises that are the proper arena for "ethicists". The authors have dodged these questions as somehow given.
To scream "Nazi!" is to degrade the argument into invective, but in fact this is precisely the behavior on the part of the Nazis that led to the death camps: that some sort of consensus involving the good of the whole - racial purity if one can still take that ludicrous assertion seriously - justified the extermination of individuals whose existence impeded the collective good. If there is a single ethical lesson to be drawn from the incredible bloodshed that was the mid-20th century, surely it must be that this line of reasoning leads to actions that are grotesquely immoral and consequences that are detrimental to both individual and collective. This isn't ethical theory, it's praxis. It's a simple observation of where the measure of individual existence in terms of the good of the collective leads. It leads to hell for both.
By “the authors” I meant Alberto Giubilin and Francesca Minerva, not the authors of this piece. Sloppy usage for which I apologize.
I had to read the article to make sure this wasn't satire.
Because actual ethics are, y'know, impractical.
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