Tuesday, July 30, 2013

This is what passes for ethical thought in medicine now

Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are “morally irrelevant” 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.
That solves EVERYTHING!  Someone is inconvenient, troublesome, too expensive, just declare them 'not a real person' and kill them!
They also argued that parents should be able to have the baby killed if it turned out to be disabled without their knowing before birth, for example citing that “only the 64 per cent of Down’s syndrome cases” in Europe are diagnosed by prenatal testing.
... “To bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care.”

Seems like I've heard of something like that before... Oh yeah:
"This person suffering from hereditary defects costs the community 60,000 Reichsmark during his lifetime. Fellow German, that is your money, too."

So, when do these ethicists start wearing skull or lightning bolt pins to show they're the enlightened ones?


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.
Really. 

They preferred to use the phrase “after-birth abortion” rather than “infanticide” to “emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus”. 
Yeah, I'd imagine they do.

3 comments:

stevierayv said...

Don't worry there is no slippery slope there we are just unenlightened.

Windy Wilson said...

"Ich Klage An."
Such effective propaganda for post-post-birth abortion the movie is still banned in Germany.

This was inevitable, you know, what with technology and technique pushing the viability of preemies back further and further, the bright-line boundary of birth became less and less relevant as a limitation in the baby-killing industry.

As an aside, there is an essay somewhere on the web that explains how "fetus" is hate speech, the indication that the entity has been declared a non-person. The proof included usage as well as non-usage, i.e. no one ever asks a pregnant woman, "Did the fetus kick? When is the fetus due?"

tkdkerry said...

From the article at The Telegraph: “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.”

Using this measure, one can easily justify "aborting" babies up to the ages of 6 or 7 years.