England: 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.
© AlamyA group of ethicists has argued that killing young babies is no different from abortion
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".
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'.
"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."
As such they argued it was "not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to become a person in the morally relevant sense".
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".
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.
Once such children were born there was "no choice for the parents but to keep the child", they wrote.
"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."
However, they did not argue that some baby killings were more justifiable than others - their fundamental point was that, morally, there was no difference to abortion as already practised.
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".
Both Minerva and Giubilini know Prof Savulescu through Oxford. Minerva was a research associate at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics until last June, when she moved to the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Melbourne University.
Giubilini, a former visiting student at Cambridge University, gave a talk in January at the Oxford Martin School - where Prof Savulescu is also a director - titled 'What is the problem with euthanasia?'
He too has gone on to Melbourne, although to the city's Monash University. Prof Savulescu worked at both univerisities before moving to Oxford in 2002.
Defending the decision to
publish in a British Medical Journal blog, Prof Savulescu, said that arguments in favour of killing newborns were "largely not new".
What Minerva and Giubilini did was apply these arguments "in consideration of maternal and family interests".
While accepting that many people would disagree with their arguments, he wrote: "The goal of the Journal of Medical Ethics is not to present the Truth or promote some one moral view. It is to present well reasoned argument based on widely accepted premises."
Speaking to
The Daily Telegraph, he added: "This "debate" has been an example of "witch ethics" - a group of people know who the witch is and seek to burn her. It is one of the most dangerous human tendencies we have. It leads to lynching and genocide. Rather than argue and engage, there is a drive is to silence and, in the extreme, kill, based on their own moral certainty. That is not the sort of society we should live in."
He said the journal would consider publishing an article positing that, if there was no moral difference between abortion and killing newborns, then abortion too should be illegal.
Dr Trevor Stammers, director of medical ethics at St Mary's University College, said: "If a mother does smother her child with a blanket, we say 'it's doesn't matter, she can get another one,' is that what we want to happen?
"What these young colleagues are spelling out is what we would be the inevitable end point of a road that ethical philosophers in the States and Australia have all been treading for a long time and there is certainly nothing new."
Referring to the term "after-birth abortion", Dr Stammers added: "This is just verbal manipulation that is not philosophy. I might refer to abortion henceforth as antenatal infanticide."
Reader Comments
Good for the goose, good for the gander... Lets reverse the roles and and see how the "ethicists" like this statement.
English parents should be allowed to kill medical ethicists from Oxford university as they are "morally irrelevant" and killing one is no different than killing a cockroach.
This sounds terrible I know but they are talking about killing babies!
"moral right to life"
I say, better no morality, than owning totally f***ed up one.
...and it is the face of a university professor!
This is just a popular article about their paper and the fuss it caused.
But I am assuming that the broad points are accurately reported.
Firstly: These "ethicists" are operating on data that I believe to be incomplete.
The data I have is that a change takes place somewhere around the time of birth. The being takes control of the body at about this time. The body is being run by another being. And that being does not leave. But they enter into a cooperative (we hope) activity, where the higher being gets the upper hand in the alert state and the body being ("genetic entity") takes over at times when the other gets overwhelmed (passes out or similar).
So, technically, the baby is on a par with other animals (though some animals may be motivated by higher beings as well) until about the time of birth when it becomes "human" (we hope).
Based on this data, I consider their argument fallacious. Birth is the turning point for that baby. It becomes a "human being" more or less exactly at that time.
That said, I don't know what to say about abortion.
Abortion kills a living organism. What killing a living organism does is violently separate the genetic entity from its physical body. The genetic entity goes off to find two of its species copulating; it never really thinks, talks, loves or hates the way higher beings do.
Killing of food plants and prey is part of the game of life. As unpleasant as it can be mocked up to be, if killing ends, living - as we know it - ends, too. So you have to draw the line somewhere.
The fact that one of these professors equated a tolerance of abortion to liberalism is telling. I really don't know what they have to do with each other. Liberalism is mostly about how adults treat each other. It does not deal so well with babies and children because it is just plain ignorant in those areas.
Real liberalism is higher-toned than real conservatism, and I subscribe to it. But it has to be honest and it has to be well-informed. These "liberal" professors are being neither. And that could be said for a lot of other "liberals" too.
In the end, it all comes down to gaining knowledge and using it for good. That is the way out of any predicament.
And many of us today find ourselves in plenty of predicaments. It is tempting to resort to superficial logic, debate, story telling, or brute force to get out of these predicaments. But none of those will work. We simply have more to learn.
"I consider their argument fallacious. Birth is the turning point for that baby. It becomes a 'human being' more or less exactly at that time."
Your own argument is fallacious and backed up by absolutely nothing but your own uninformed, unscientific opinion. While it is not a crime, it is clear that you have no idea about when a baby still in utero becomes a human being. What is your litmus test and upon what authority do you administer it?
A baby's DNA signature is created at the moment of conception, ergo...
While certain faculties may not be fully operational in a baby, they are present even if latent. What if an old person loses the use of various faculties that are latent in babies? Are we to conclude said person is no longer a human being? May we kill them?
The truth is: the very best abortion advocates can argue is that they have absolutely no idea when a baby that is still in utero becomes a person. As such, the only sane course is to take the safer course because, even by their own admission, they have absolutely no idea whether or not an abortion kills a human being -- i.e., they are bound by their own principles to admit that every single abortion may very well be murder. They will say it is not, but they have absolutely no means of proving their position. People seem to think the burden of proof is on those who oppose abortion; nothing could be further from the truth. No one has to definitively prove abortion IS murder; those who are in favor of it must prove, beyond all possible shadow of a doubt, that it is NOT murder. So far, there has been no cogent argument to that effect -- nor will there ever be.
Yes, it is a touchy subject and I know there are intelligent people of goodwill on both sides of the fence, but the foregoing argument is unassailable.
From the moment we are conceived,(the foundation upon which all else develops) we start gathering information about our environment, (e.g. our mother to whom we are so intimatly connected) including her emotional states. As you are aware when we feel something we feel it with every cell in our body. (So feeling/sensing is innate in every living cell on the planet).
At around 18 weeks (possibly sooner) we become "aware" of something other than ourselves and an external world.
I have spoken to a few people who remember being in the womb.
What we are refering to is a developing human being and although we reach physical maturity fairly early in our lives, emotional maturity can take considerably longer. In fact some things dont become "clear" until we confront our own mortality which for most people is when we come close to death. So arguably we dont not stop developing in some way untill the day we die!
The only situation that should be called abortion is when it is spontaneous.
Everything else is the deliberate termination of life.
Before birth or after birth is irrelevant.
Every birth should be valued and loving homes should be found for the ones who, for whatever reason, cannot be cared for by their biological parents. Once upon a time this was true but we have had the insideous idea of the "Nuclear Family" introduced that has separated us from each other and helped to weaken our sense of community.
We waste unimaginable amounts of money and human effort on the military but when it comes to actually taking care of humans or substantially assisting people whose children are born with Downs Syndrome etc., so it does not create hardship for them, it is said to be a burdon on society.
There are some in this world who will do everything in their power to dehumanise us and get us to hate ourselves and each other.
If we listen to them we are lost.
people stress so much importance to what "THEIR opinion is".... nonsense. who cares about someone's opinion... you are just a tiny soul with a tiny brain and a few random thoughts... compared to the cosmos and the world we live in, we r so very tiny... insignificant.. yet each one is thinking "I am the universe"...
No 2 people on this planet agree with each other on everything... so we cannot ever come to a conclusion like this... that is why we have to accept the scriptures because that is the word of God and we have to agree to what the creator/designer finally says.