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
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".
