This
past weekend and into this week, the Internet was abuzz with chatter
about an article seriously examining the justification of infanticide.
And the proposition originated in the Journal of Medical Ethics!
Political
pundits and bloggers were Tweeting and writing about an article from
two years ago on Slate.com which debated the points made by ethicists
Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
It's not clear what sparked the renewed interest in the article, but
it's important to once again tackle this issue and respond to the
disturbing propositions threatening innocent life.
HLI Fellow Dr. Denise Hunnell wrote an
article responding to the ethicists' claims back in 2012 when the story first broke. HLI reprinted the article this week on our
Truth and Charity Forum, and I wanted to share it with you in our newsletter. God bless.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Father Shenan J. Boquet
President, Human Life International
After Birth Abortion: A Modest Proposal?
by Denise Hunnell, M.D.
Let
us consider two excerpts, and see if we can determine which comes from
the realm of fiction, and which comes from the field of modern ethics.
The first:
That
the remaining hundred thousand may, at a year old, be offered in the
sale to the persons of quality and fortune through the kingdom; always
advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so
as to render them plump and fat for a good table. A child will make two
dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines
alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and
seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the
fourth day, especially in winter.
And the second:
Abortion
is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do
with the fetus' health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns
do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that
both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is
not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue
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. (After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?
Journal of Medical Ethics, February 23, 2012)
I suppose the jargon in the latter gives it away.
When I first read the latter, an abstract from the article "
After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?" published in the
Journal of Medical Ethics, I was hoping it would be the prelude of an updated version of Jonathan Swift's eighteenth century work
A Modest Proposal,
from which the first excerpt is drawn,In Swift's eerily prescient
satire, the protagonist argues that the solution to poverty is to eat
the children of the poor.
Alarmingly,
unlike Jonathan Swift's work, the abstract is not from a work of
satire. It is ostensibly a serious presentation by ethicists Alberto
Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, who argue that parents should be
allowed to kill newborn infants for any reason that is currently used
to justify abortion. In fact, they do not constrain their proposal to a
specific time period after birth but claim that a child has no right to
life until she adequately demonstrates the very nebulous and
subjective characteristic of "self-awareness".
Giubilini
and Minerva are not, at least not in this article, arguing that the
killed children should also be eaten. Fortunately, that detail of
Swift's solution remains fiction. Even so, the expressions of outrage
over this piece have been harsh and swift. Indeed, the editor of the
Journal of Medical Ethics felt compelled to release a
statement defending the publication of this provocative article, although the defense was weak at best.
That an argument for killing newborns would be made should not be surprising. Similar reasoning was put forth by
Michael Tooley in 1972 and by
Peter Singer in 1993.
Giubilini and Minerva simply extend these arguments to include killing
perfectly healthy newborns that merely pose a burden or inconvenience
to their mothers or to society as a whole. In addition, they argue that
logic demands the option to kill disabled infants, especially those
with genetic diseases like Downs syndrome, when the diagnosis is not
made until after birth. Why, they ask, should a woman have every option
including abortion before birth, and no options after birth?
As
reprehensible as their conclusions are, Giubilini and Minerva agree
with pro-lifers on two key points. First, they fully accept that the
unborn and the newborn are both living human beings, accepting without
argument the scientific reality that a biological human being begins at
conception. Thus, they forthrightly acknowledge that both abortion and
infanticide involve the taking of human life.
Second,
Giubilini and Minerva agree that the event of birth is irrelevant to
the moral status of both the unborn child and the newborn. In order to
make their proposal more palatable, they eschew the term "infanticide"
to emphasize that the lives of the newborn and the fetus carry the same
moral weight. In this, they find agreement with the Catholic Church
and all who recognize the full humanity of the unborn child. There is
absolutely no difference in the moral standing of a child in the womb
and a newborn in her mother's arms.
If
they have such essential points right, how do they end up so wrong?
Their errors begin when they assign the arbitrary status of "potential
person" to both the unborn and the newborn. With absolutely no
justification other than their own opinion for such an assertion, they
echo Peter Singer in declaring that while the unborn and newborn are
living human beings, they lack the self-awareness to qualify as "actual
persons." In fact, also following Singer, the authors go so far as to
claim that personhood is a characteristic that can be assigned to
non-human animals that demonstrate a sense of self:
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. This means
that many non- human animals and mentally retarded human individuals
are persons, but that all the individuals who are not in the condition
of attributing any value to their own existence are not persons. Merely
being human is not in itself a reason for ascribing someone a right to
life.
Giubilini
and Minerva go on to declare that when "aborting" a "potential
person," no life is really lost. A true person never existed.
Therefore, one cannot destroy what never was.
What
Giubilini and Minerva cannot justify is their authority to declare
some human beings as "potential persons." If they can dismiss the life
and dignity of a newborn child based on the lack of an arbitrary
concept of self-awareness, what is to stop others from declaring that
true personhood requires a specific level of intelligence or gender or
race or creed?
What
Giubilini and Minerva effectively do is subjugate the life and dignity
of the vulnerable to the whims of the powerful, who are allowed to
determine who is and who is not a person. This is the fatal flaw of
attributing human dignity based on some external evaluation. Either one
accepts that every human being is worthy of life and dignity, or you
are forced to adopt capricious and subjective metrics as the basis of
one's claim to rights and dignity. It takes great arrogance to presume
both the wisdom to judge which human lives are worth living as well as
the prescience to know whose life will be too burdensome.
The
fundamental error of Giubilini and Minerva is that they fail to
recognize that every human being is of inestimable worth. The dignity
of every human life is an intrinsic characteristic - it cannot be
granted or denied according to some arbitrary algorithm. Further, the
term "potential person" has no basis in science, although this error is
not unique to Giubilini and Minerva: It is common to all those who
advocate for abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, or any
other actions that relegate human lives to a disposable status.
Perhaps
now those who have thus far seen room for a "compromise" in the areas
of abortion and other beginning-of-life issues might recognize the
urgency of reaffirming the dignity and value of every human being
without exception. No one who allows that some human beings are more
valuable than others can honestly be shocked and outraged by Giubilini
and Minerva's argument. These ethicists merely carry this sadly common
premise to its logical conclusion, and offer a very "Modest Proposal".
Talk
about a shotgun wedding! One dad just couldn’t wait for his fiancé to
be done birthing their child before he made her his wife. Brandi Wetzel
was laboring away at a hospital in Fort Worth, Texas on Tuesday when her
intended suddenly “ran to the store.”
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event in 2014? Don't have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing thousands of dollars? Contact LifeNews at 
Yesterday
NPR’s Morning Edition reported on advances in the development of
precise prenatal tests for Down syndrome and other genetic disorders.
The report praised new tests that allow women to know more accurately
and more quickly whether their children have a genetic disorder.
Pro-life
lawmakers, beware. Abortion giant Planned Parenthood's political
operations are planning their largest-ever campaign blitz for this
year's midterm and gubernatorial elections, poised to pour millions into
key races that could determine who controls Congress.
Michelle
Duggar knows all about mom body issues. The mother of 19 children, who
with her family stars in TLC's reality series "19 Kids and Counting,"
says she gained a few pounds with each baby. Happens to a lot of women
and it's no big deal if you have a couple kids. But when you hit double
digits, those few pounds start to add up.
I
am a homosexual, but I’m against ‘gay marriage,’” a French pro-family
activist told an Italian Catholic opinion paper earlier this month.
A
federal judge declared a same-sex "marriage" ban in deeply conservative
Texas unconstitutional on Wednesday, but will allow the nation's
second-most populous state to enforce the law pending an appeal that
will likely go to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The
coverage extends to all D.C. residents with group or individual health
insurance — including the roughly one-third of city residents receiving
Medicaid benefits — whose doctors diagnose the condition and for whom
treatment is deemed medically necessary.
In
the wake of Belgium's recent decision to legalize euthanasia for
children, several members of the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life
voiced their dismay at the new practice.
Montclair, CA - Liberalization of California's abortion laws last year
could not save the Family Planning Associates abortion clinic in
Montclair, California, which has closed due to a lost lease. The
building is up for sale and there are currently no plans to reopen the
clinic at another location.
