My fellow water swiggers, I’m in a very cheerful mood today, but this is just too much.
From the Telegraph: “Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say.”
Well, yes. As Catholic, I would agree with that statement.
Oops, except that said “experts” and I are looking at the thing from completely, catastrophically opposite angles:
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.
Just glance down again at that quote from C.S. Lewis about the difference between Christians and Materialists. I don’t post these things out of mere whim. This is an example of the horrid logic about short-term “happiness” spawned by the latter.
We [i.e., the 'experts'] 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.”
Read the rest, if you can stomach it. And be sure not to miss the part where the fellah in charge defends his crew against the “witch hunt” mentality that their paper has stirred up. It’s so unfair!
I suppose I could say “damn you” to these so-called experts, but it strikes me that they’re doing a pretty good job of taking care of that biznay themselves.
(N.I.C.E. explained, for those unfamiliar with the reference.)
UPDATE: Goldberg from the Couch. After my posts:
The “ethicists” essentially agree, as a categorical matter. Killing a baby is akin to aborting a fetus — so go ahead and kill babies! In other words if you place no moral weight on a fetus, they argue, you should place no moral weight on a newborn either. Conversely if you invest enormous moral weight to a newborn, argue the pro-lifers, you should invest at least some moral weight in a fetus as well.
The moral difference in worldview is total, but the terms and logic are remarkably similar.
Conclusive proof that the G-File is a secret port swiller!
6 comments
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February 29, 2012 at 7:46 pm
diane
While I’m shocked they would come out in print saying those things, I’m not particularly surprised. As soon as we started making it legal (and pushing to make it morally acceptable as well) to abort children and euthanize the elderly, we began the “race to the middle” – the process leading to making it acceptable at some point to cull out any misfit at any time – whether a baby because of a disabilty, or a middle aged chap because he holds opinions counter to what “society” deems the norm.
February 29, 2012 at 7:50 pm
Robbo
Yep. Hitler made eugenics uncool for a while, but here we go again.
February 29, 2012 at 11:20 pm
tubbs
Hmmm, Something here – I tend to agree witht these “ethicists.” I’ve always been against fetal abortion. I say – let the lil’ buggers live for a few years first, just to get an idee how their gonna turn out – THEN SNUFF ‘EM IF YOU DON’T LIKE THE RESULTS.
March 1, 2012 at 12:14 am
tubbs
(and one of these days I’ll learn to proof read before hitting the ‘post’ key)
March 1, 2012 at 3:29 pm
rbj
And it’s not just babies. How about anyone disabled to the point of “an individual who is [in]capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value.” I declare this topic exempt from Godwin’s law, as these people are Josef Mengele level nazis.
And if someone is capable, but chooses not to, why not slap chains on him and force him to contribute to society at the crack of the whip. And if a large part of a certain group has similar behavior, enslave the whole group. Or march them of to the “showers.”
The authors, their colleagues who don’t denounce them, and the editor need to be shunned by society.
March 4, 2012 at 8:21 pm
The Maximum Leader
My freshman year of college I listened to a debate between my philosophy professor and a visiting philosophy profession on the issue of “defining life.” Basically, the visiting prof advanced much the same argument back in 1987 as the Telegraph is reporting on.
Just as bad back then as it is now.