I agree. Both abortion and infanticide are evil. Both destroy innocent life...
However, ethicists have been twisting the truth and are making the argument to legitimize infanticide. Were we not warned about the slippery slope of legalized abortion? And here we are, at the mouth of the pit...
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.
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”.
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’. - Source
Unspeakable crime.
"Among all the crimes which can be committed against life, procured abortion has characteristics making it particularly serious and deplorable. The Second Vatican Council defines abortion, together with infanticide, as an 'unspeakable crime.'" - Evangelium Vitae
+JMJ+
ReplyDeleteWhen I was in uni, I read an article by a Philosophy major who described herself as an ethicist that recommended prosecuting parents whose behavior and choices before their child's birth resulted in the child being born handicapped in some way. But she was very clear that this did not mean abortion was wrong, because there is a difference between a "foetus" and a "future person."
Yeah, got it.
"In 2002, as an Illinois legislator, Obama voted against the Induced Infant Liability Act, which would have protected babies that survived late-term abortions."
ReplyDeleteWe're not that far. Not with this administration, or the next. But who knows a few years from now...
Terry - just sent you a story that broke this week in Ohio that dovetails this one too ... culturally speaking.
ReplyDeleteI recommend highly War is the Passion by Caryll Houselander. It was published in 1941 and her vision of the Second Coming that details the young children (the innocent) is a haunting vision of heavenly justice our society should ponder upon.
I think this is a good thing. The "ethicists'" conclusion that infanticide is no different than abortion is obviously true - a lot of pro-choice people are not evil in the same way Peter Singer is, but are simply playing a game of "ignore what's really going on".
ReplyDeleteIf being in the womb allows the murder to go unseen, they can easily forget about it. But few people are willing to concede that murdering a newborn infant is okay. It may cause some people to reassess their positions, is all I'm saying - and it proves what pro-Lifers have always said.
This is actually old news. Killing babies after they're born has been legal in the U.S. since the mid 80s. Baby Doe of Indiana and Baby Jane Doe of NY were the court cases.
ReplyDeleteIt's also fairly common.
As for killing any baby for any reason. Fr. Paul Marx in the Death Peddlers wrote that those who were pushing for abortion where likewise at the same time pushing for a 6 month window before babies were granted personhood so that parents had a better opportunity to look over their baby to see if they should keep it or kill it.
I should add, killing born babies who are perfectly healthy used to be legal in the U.S. Fetal experimentation of babies born by hystorotomy abortion, (same procedure as a cesarean section), was somewhat common.
ReplyDeleteAnd I suppose it still is since hystorotomy abortion is legal, they just can't do gruesome experiments on them but can only cut them up for part to be sold.
love the girls -
ReplyDeleteIs it considered "hysterectomy abortion" for example when a woman has her uterus removed in order to save her life (in a case where she'd definitely die), but the death of the baby is accepted as an unfortunate effect of that? Isn't that a textbook case of double effect, and moralists say that's licit?
I'm actually confused. Please explain.
Tears keep welling up and my chest feels heavy. Nothing more to say.
ReplyDeleteMercury,
ReplyDeleteA hysterotomy abortion is different.
It's a C-section abortion. The baby is delivered alive and killed after it's born.
http://prolife101.com/?page_id=341
Oooh, -otomy, not -ectomy - well I guess that's today's new vocabulary word. Not a very pleasant one, though.
ReplyDelete