Originally Posted by
Doozer
By Stephen Adams in London
Thursday March 01 2012
PARENTS should be allowed to have newborn babies killed as it is no different from abortion, medical ethics experts linked to*Oxford University
*have argued.
Newborns are not "actual persons" and do not have a "moral right to life", they say. Parents should be able to have a baby killed if it turns out to be disabled, or for any other reason that would allow an abortion, they add in an article in the 'Journal of Medical Ethics'.
The authors had received death threats following its publication, said the journal's editor, Prof Julian Savulescu, who is the director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.
He said that those who had made abusive and threatening responses 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 Dr Alberto Giubilini and Dr Francesca Minerva.
They argued: "The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a foetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual."
They explained: "Both a foetus 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."
The authors 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".
They also argued that parents should be able to have a baby killed if it turned out to be disabled when born.
They added, as an example, that many cases of*Down Syndrome
*were not identified by pre-natal 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," they wrote.
Justifiable
They did not argue that some baby killings were more justifiable than others, but that morally they were no different from abortion as already practised.
Defending the decision to publish the article, Prof Savulescu said that arguments in favour of infanticide were "largely not new" and his journal was not to "promote some one moral view.
It is to present "well-reasoned argument based on widely accepted premises".
He said the journal would consider publishing an article arguing that, if there was no moral difference between abortion and killing newborns, then abortion too should be illegal. (© Daily Telegraph, London)
- Stephen Adams in London
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