Posted on 05/07/2012 4:51:54 PM PDT by wagglebee
In February of 2012, a pair of left-wing “philosophers” wrote a paper that claimed that babies aren’t human until they can become cognizant of themselves, aware that if they were to be “aborted” or killed they’d be losing something valuable, their lives.
This, they claimed, justified abortion as well as post birth infanticide. Naturally they had elaborate justifications for their stance and what they wrote is chilling indeed, for it essentially states that only people that think like them are really worth the status of “human,” worth having their lives considered sacrosanct.
The pair, Alberto Giubilini of Milan, Italy, and Francesca Minerva of Australia, held as a central thesis that since abortion is so commonly accepted there had to be a more expansive use for it. That use, the pair decided, should be to cover killing babies born with developmental problems. After all, they said, neither fetuses or newborns “have the same moral status as actual persons,” so this certainly must mean that newborns with catastrophic birth defects could be killed without any moral reservations.
Here is how they justified the non-human status of both a fetus and a born baby.
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.
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. This means that many non-human animals and mentally retarded human individuals are persons, but that all the individuals who are not in the condition of attributing any value to their own existence are not persons. Merely being human is not in itself a reason for ascribing someone a right to life. Indeed, many humans are not considered subjects of a right to life: spare embryos where research on embryo stem cells is permitted, fetuses where abortion is permitted, criminals where capital punishment is legal.
This is chilling for its cold approach to life, but worse for its vagueness.
Let’s examine the main point of what makes someone a worthy human in these liberal’s minds. They feel that unless someone can understand the “basic value” of their own life, then they don’t count for personhood.
This is so entirely ague that anyone can qualify for elimination in a large number of situations.
The pair mentions that mentally retarded people can qualify for elimination, that they aren’t cognizant of the value of their own lives. But are you aware of yourself when you are in a coma from an accident? Are you any longer aware of yourself if you have Alzheimer’s? How about if you have devolved to infantile status at the end of your life? Should your children have the right to just kill you instead of keeping you alive in that case?
How far does this “thought” criteria go? Can these “philosophers” decide that if you are happy drinking beer, working as a car mechanic, and watching reality TV that this isn’t enough cognition to qualify to be self-aware? Could they decide that unless you think exactly like them, why, you aren’t properly a human? Of course they could because they would be in charge of deciding what “thought” qualifies as enough to make you a real person.
Imagine what this means? It means that the left is leaving behind its reliance on “science” and alighting on “thought” to serve as a basis to assess who is worth what. No longer is mere biology something worth considering. That long-held justification for abortion using the unviable cells argument is now out. Instead we will henceforth set out to determine if people are thinking properly to ascertain if they are worth keeping alive.
Chilling, no?
Worse, imagine how much more dangerous these ideas will become when governments decide to use them as a basis for policy! We will have governments determining who is “worth” being called a human based on how the person being judged thinks.
Extremely chilling, indeed.
LifeNews.com Note: Warner Todd Huston is an editorial columnist whose work is featured on numerous web sites. He has also written for several history magazines, and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture.”
“We might as well try having a discussion with a vat of maggots.”
At least maggots serve a useful function, devouring dead tissue. The maggots need to get to work on these bastards’ brains.
Pro-Life Ping
Please add me!
Neither do animals in the slaughter house. But they still resent the process.
Whatever it takes to justify something that makes life more convenient...in this case, killing infants with genetic anomalies that weren’t caught in time for an abortion to be carried out. We’ve come right back to ancient Greece in such an undeniable way, and yet people still turn a blind eye to it because it’s convenient to be able to kill children who are too burdensome.
Here's the deal - these folks are fine with killing anyone they think might not turn out to meet their standards. They only get disturbed when they think the killing might turn out to be by somebody else's standards. And in the Third Reich, it did. To Hitler's butchers, what they were doing made sense. What these guys are advocating makes sense to them, too. To them I humbly suggest that if some of us are horrified by it, it might be due to something other than close-mindedness.
lol
total rubbish
try covering a new borns face and watch how fast they try and pull whatever is covering it away!
all living things KNOW they are alive and will struggle to stay alive.
They rationalize murder with whatever argument is handy at the moment.
If the baby DID understand, they would then proclaim that a birth defect or mother in poverty would mean a life that was not "quality", therefore, as Jim Jones himself would argue, death is the preferable option than to live one more day.
Or put a cap in the professor's sleeping ass.
F&$%#*g Dolt!
The NAZIs sure thought so.
You nailed it. These idiots don’t think past their last breath.
I’ll bet if one were to sneak up behind these basturds and put a shot in the back of their heads, they would not know they were being killed either.
What a load of illogical and unhuman crap they spew.
Be aware, all, that barbarians like this are giving The Won his daily directions via his Blackberry.
That’s who we’re up against.
Stalinists don’t believe all of the bullstalin they spew. They just say whatever it takes to get you to accept their way.
The “science” of genetic homosexuality are just for those who will be swayed by such arguments. They really believe in an end to ALL moral judgment over ALL sexual pairings, regardless of sex, age, relation, martial status, number, or species of partner(s). If they explain that someone people “can’t help themselves”, well maybe some will surrender to the group think. Transvestitism is not natural. We are born naked, there is no gene to “wear the other’s sex’s clothing”. Clothing is determined by culture and fashion.
The goal of “global warming science” is to reduce the size and production of the West. China and India are permitted to continuing using so-called “fossil fuels” and burning tires and coal. But some well-intentioned Americans are willing to use crappy toilets, low wattage light bulbs, and short range electric cars “to do their part to save the planet”.
Abortion serves the “zero population growth” mindset of the Left (who said 42 years ago that we would be facing a population explosion). It also serves the “do as thou will” philosophy of the sex positive hedonists. Why worry about the next generations when the goal is to live for today as thou wants?
Don’t look for consistency from Stalinist minds.
Only if you do it in secret, so that the right to privacy stands to trump any complaints.
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