Sunday, March 29, 2015

"Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say"

Via Greg Gutfeld: Post-birth abortion? It aint no joke now.
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’.
Link to abstract of the article

20 comments:

William said...

There are no slippery slopes that tilt left. Their slopes are the E-Z pass to utopia.

bagoh20 said...

Well duh! They don't even have a Twitter account, so who cares what happens to them.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

as the late talk show host Bob Grant used to say... “It's sick out there and getting sicker”.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

"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”."

Talk about a culture of death.

bagoh20 said...

I see where this is going - no college degree = no person. You gotta pay the man to stay alive. I could see us deciding that anyone who has not actually contributed something measurable to society or at least had a net tax contribution is not a person, but then I suspect that these authors would be in big trouble, so naturally they speak truth to the most powerful among us. "Courage."

Fr Martin Fox said...

Some of us have been against killing babies for a long time. We didn't need a lot of explanation.

Lydia said...

That article was published in 2012, and one of the authors, Francesca Minerva, is now all about being able to publish academic articles anonymously:

"I would prefer a world where people were free to ask questions and to attempt to give answers to those questions without being dragged into media frenzies, missing out on job opportunities (as happened to both me and Alberto Giubilini) and being threatened with physical harm."

Can't find a job, eh? Surely Peter Singer can help her out.

Methadras said...

The fucking pretzeling ju-jitsu that intellectuals will go through to justify their cult of death desires knows no bounds.

Methadras said...

bagoh20 said...

I see where this is going - no college degree = no person. You gotta pay the man to stay alive. I could see us deciding that anyone who has not actually contributed something measurable to society or at least had a net tax contribution is not a person, but then I suspect that these authors would be in big trouble, so naturally they speak truth to the most powerful among us. "Courage."


It's got Gattica written all over it.

Synova said...

Nothing particularly new... Peter Singer and all.

I wonder though... these sorts of things are probably good things to get out in the open. Shine a bright light on infanticide with no cover of concern about the rights of the mother...

No, no one should be forced to conceive and bear a baby against her will. Did you have a point?

From conception onward the dependency of the fetus is transitory. Do we take away people's rights because they are temporarily impaired?

Having a couple of "philosophers" state outright that, if we judge the personhood of any person on their level of cognitive ability, that infants are not fully people... it can only be a good thing to SAY outright, in public, in the light of day.

Those who try to explain why it's okay to abort a fetus really ought to face the actual argument... the fetus is not developed yet. Neither is the infant. Probably not even a toddler. Some people are impaired permanently, at what point do they count as people?

Any time we make arguments about why it's okay to *define* a human as somehow not having human status... we're not on a slippery slope, we're standing at the bottom of the pit.

Michael Haz said...

Some of us have been against killing babies for a long time. We didn't need a lot of explanation.

This.

Lydia said...

Francesca Minerva is now at the University of Melbourne, and it must be that her "post-birth abortion" has not set well with too many, even in academia, because she now seems to have gone off in a quite different area of study -- her research now "looks at aesthetic enhancement and discrimination against unattractive people". You can watch her explaining it in a video here.

So I'm a bit hopeful that her shining what Synova called the "bright light on infanticide with no cover of concern about the rights of the mother" did have a somewhat positive effect in waking up some people.

chickelit said...

Lydia said...
Francesca Minerva is now at the University of Melbourne,..

There's a church in Assisi consecrated on the site of a Roman temple to Minerva (cf. Athena). I recall admiring it long ago.

So Minerva has been trumped.

edutcher said...

This, of course, is the same logic that led to Auschwitz.

If we're going to do post-birth abortion, why not start with Lefties, instead of babies?

rhhardin said...

I sort of agree with it, on there being no bright line at birth; and that newborns aren't persons.

Birth though is where society takes an interest, and makes a nice bright line. People care for an infact that's there to see.

Goffman has a whole non-threatening literature on the ways we say stuff for infants, and treat them as if they'd said it. It's by methods like that that they learn to be human, more than human as opposed to wolf.

Normally the literature is taken to affirm the care we give without knowing it, but it also shows the point of that care.

The grammar of what constitutes a human or a person is much more subtle and interesting than DNAism.

As to crossing the birth line, that's not going to work. Society needs caring for the person who's there in order for society to function at all.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

I'm left to wonder what effect killing babies with Down's Syndrome will have on participation in varsity level high school athletic programs.

Aridog said...

Bagoh20 said ...

I could see us deciding that anyone who has not actually contributed something measurable to society or at least had a net tax contribution is not a person, ...

Whoa! Now that could evolve in to knocking off about 47% of the population of the USA...regardless of age. You could be determined not a "person" at age 60 +/- just as well as at day one.

Methadras said...

If you want to see what the utopian world where this occurs looks like to some degree, go watch the movie called "The Giver".

Evi L. Bloggerlady said...

It's all Greek to me.

JAL said...

Hey -- but Cosmo showed us that smoking moms are Baaaad because the fetus (<-- strikeout) baby does. not. like. it.

So the smoked upon fetuses (<--strike that out) babies should be allowed to live because they do not like smoking.