It isn’t just Peter Singer anymore. Last year, the Journal for Professional Ethics in Oxford published an article arguing for the outright killing of full term born-alive, fully viable healthy babies.
Here’s a quote:
–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’.”
And a little later on…
–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”.
The authors of this study have received death threats in response to their published article. I cannot help but note the irony of their complaint against these threats: “those who made abusive and threatening posts about the study were “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society”
Isn’t it strange that two people making arbitrary determinations about the worthiness of a healthy human baby to live are upset that someone else is making equivalent suggestions about them. I don’t condone the violence, but I do wish they’d stop and recognize the horrible irony.
The only upside I can see in this story is that they fully agree that the status of the child in his mother’s arms and in his mother’s uterus is not meaningfully different. Aside from the fact that he was arguing that abortion was a reason to kill the infant, and we would argue that the living infant is reason NOT to kill the child in the womb, we are making basically the same claims.
By the way, pro-Abortion advocates… what was that again about the slippery slope being a joke?
You can find the whole story at the Telegraph: telegraph.co.uk
