{"id":7539,"date":"2012-03-24T14:05:17","date_gmt":"2012-03-24T21:05:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/?p=7539"},"modified":"2012-03-26T14:16:35","modified_gmt":"2012-03-26T21:16:35","slug":"declaring-war-on-newborns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2012\/03\/declaring-war-on-newborns\/","title":{"rendered":"Declaring War on Newborns"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Declaring by Andrew Ferguson –
\nThe disgrace of medical ethics.<\/em><\/strong>
\nOn the list of the world\u2019s most unnecessary occupations\u2014aromatherapist, golf pro, journalism professor, vice president of the United States\u200b\u2014\u200bthat of medical ethicist ranks very high. They are happily employed by pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and other outposts of the vast medical-industrial combine, where their job is to advise the boss to go ahead and do what he was going to do anyway (\u201cPut it on the market!\u201d \u201cPull the plug on the geezer!\u201d). They also attend conferences where they take turns sitting on panels talking with one another and then sitting in the audience watching panels of other medical ethicists talking with one another. Their professional specialty is the \u201cthought experiment,\u201d which is the best kind of experiment because you don\u2019t have to buy test tubes or leave the office. And sometimes they get jobs at universities, teaching other people to become ethicists. It is a cozy, happy world they live in.<\/p>\n

But it was painfully roiled last month, when a pair of medical ethicists took to their profession\u2019s bible, the Journal of Medical Ethics<\/em>, and published an essay with a misleadingly inconclusive title: \u201cAfter-birth Abortion: Why should the baby live?\u201d It was a misleading title because the authors believe the answer to the question is: \u201cBeats me.\u201d <\/p>\n

Right at the top, the ethicists summarized the point of their article. \u201cWhat we call \u2018after-birth abortion\u2019 (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.\u201d <\/p>\n

The argument made by the authors\u200b\u2014\u200bAlberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, both of them affliliated with prestigious universities in Australia and ethicists of pristine reputation\u200b\u2014\u200bruns as follows. Let\u2019s suppose a woman gets pregnant. She decides to go ahead and have the baby on the assumption that her personal circumstances, and her views on such things as baby-raising, will remain the same through the day she gives birth and beyond.<\/p>\n

Then she gives birth. Perhaps the baby is disabled or suffers a disease. Perhaps her boyfriend or (if she\u2019s old-fashioned) her husband abandons her, leaving her in financial peril. Or perhaps she\u2019s decided that she\u2019s just not the mothering kind, for, as the authors write, \u201chaving a child can itself be an unbearable burden for the psychological health of the woman or for her already existing children, regardless of the condition of the fetus.\u201d<\/p>\n

The authors point out that each of these conditions\u200b\u2014\u200bthe baby is sick or suffering, the baby will be a financial hardship, the baby will be personally troublesome\u200b\u200b\u2014\u200b\u200bis now \u201clargely accepted\u201d as a good reason for a mother to abort her baby before he\u2019s born. So why not after?<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen circumstances occur after birth<\/em> such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion<\/em> should be permissible.\u201d (Their italics.) Western societies approve abortion because they have reached a consensus that a fetus is not a person; they should acknowledge that by the same definition a newborn isn\u2019t a person either. Neither fetus nor baby has developed a sufficient sense of his own life to know what it would be like to be deprived of it. The kid will never know the difference, in other words. A newborn baby is just a fetus who\u2019s hung around a bit too long.<\/p>\n

As the authors acknowledge, this makes an \u201cafter-birth abortion\u201d a tricky business. You have to get to the infant before he develops \u201cthose properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.\u201d It\u2019s a race against time.<\/p>\n

The article doesn\u2019t go on for more than 1,500 words, but for non-ethicists it has a high surprise-per-word ratio. The information that newborn babies aren\u2019t people is just the beginning. A reader learns that \u201cmany non-human animals \u2026 are persons\u201d and therefore enjoy a \u201cright to life.\u201d (Such ruminative ruminants, unlike babies, are self-aware enough to know that getting killed will entail a \u201closs of value.\u201d) The authors don\u2019t tell us which species these \u201cnon-human persons\u201d belong to, but it\u2019s safe to say that you don\u2019t want to take a medical ethicist to dinner at Outback.<\/p>\n

But what about adoption, you ask. The authors ask that question too, noting that some people\u200b\u2014\u200byou and me, for example\u200b\u2014\u200bmight think that adoption could buy enough time for the unwanted newborn to technically become a person and \u201cpossibly increase the happiness of the people involved.\u201d But this is not a viable option, if you\u2019ll forgive the expression. A mother who kills her newborn baby, the authors report, is forced to \u201caccept the irreversibility of the loss.\u201d By contrast, a mother who gives her baby up for adoption \u201cmight suffer psychological distress.\u201d And for a very simple reason: These mothers \u201coften dream that their child will return to them. This makes it difficult to accept the reality of the loss because they can never be quite sure whether or not it is irreversible.\u201d It\u2019s simpler for all concerned just to make sure the loss can\u2019t be reversed. It\u2019ll spare Mom a lot of heartbreak.<\/p>\n

Now, it\u2019s at this point in the Journal of Medical Ethics<\/em> that many readers will begin to suspect, as I did, that their legs are being not very subtly pulled. The inversion that the argument entails is Swiftian\u200b\u2014\u200ba twenty-first-century Modest Proposal without the cannibalism (for now). Jonathan Swift\u2019s original Modest Proposal called for killing Irish children to prevent them \u201cfrom being a burden to their parents.\u201d It was death by compassion, the killing of innocents based on a surfeit of fellow-feeling. The authors agree that compassion itself demands the death of newborns. Unlike Swift, though, they aren\u2019t kidding.<\/p>\n

They get you coming and going, these guys. They assume\u200b\u2014\u200band they won\u2019t get much argument from their peers in the profession\u200b\u2014\u200bthat \u201cmentally impaired\u201d infants are eligible for elimination because they will never develop the properties necessary to be fully human. Then they discuss Treacher-Collins syndrome, which causes facial deformities and respiratory ailments but no mental impairment. Kids with TCS are \u201cfully aware of their condition, of being different from other people and of all the problems their pathology entails,\u201d and are therefore, to spare them a life of such unpleasant awareness, eligible for elimination too\u200b\u2014\u200bbecause they are not<\/em> mentally impaired. The threshold to this \u201cright to life\u201d just gets higher and higher, the more you think about it.<\/p>\n

And of course it is their business to think about it. It\u2019s what medical ethicists get paid to do: cogitate, cogitate, cogitate. As \u201cAfter-birth Abortion\u201d spread around the world and gained wide publicity\u200b\u2014\u200bthat damned Internet \u200b\u2014\u200bnon-ethicists greeted it with derision or shock or worse. The authors and the editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics<\/em> were themselves shocked at the response. As their inboxes flooded with hate mail, the authors composed an apology of sorts that non-ethicists will find more revealing even than the original paper.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are really sorry that many people, who do not share the background of the intended audience for this article, felt offended, outraged, or even threatened,\u201d they wrote. \u201cThe article was supposed to be read by other fellow bioethicists who were already familiar with this topic and our arguments.\u201d It was a thought experiment<\/em>. After all, among medical ethicists \u201cthis debate\u201d\u200b\u2014\u200babout when it\u2019s proper to kill babies\u200b\u2014\u200b\u201chas been going on for 40 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s<\/em> what they\u2019ve been talking about in all those panel discussions! The authors thought they were merely taking the next step in a train of logic that was set in motion, and has been widely accepted, since their profession was invented in the 1960s. And of course they were. The outrage directed at their article came from laymen\u200b\u2014\u200bpeople unsophisticated in contemporary ethics. Medical ethicists in general expressed few objections, only a minor annoyance that the authors had let the cat out of the bag. A few days after it was posted the article was removed from the publicly accessible area of the Journal<\/em>\u2019s website, sending it back to that happy, cozy world.<\/p>\n

You\u2019d have to be very, very well trained in ethics to see the authors\u2019 argument as a morally acceptable extension of their premises, but you can\u2019t deny the logic of it. The rest of us will see in the argument an extension of its premises into self-evident absurdity. Pro-lifers should take note. For years, in public argument, pro-choicers have mocked them for not following their belief in a fetus\u2019s humanity to its logical end. Shouldn\u2019t you execute doctors who perform abortions? Why don\u2019t you have funerals for miscarriages?<\/em><\/p>\n

As one pro-choice wag, writing about the Republicans\u2019 pro-life platform, put it in the Washington Post<\/em> a few years ago: \u201cThe official position of the Republican Party is that women who have abortions should be executed.\u201d<\/p>\n

And now we know the pro-choice position is that children born with a facial deformity should be executed too, as long as you get to them quick enough. Unwittingly the insouciant authors of \u201cAfter-birth Abortion\u201d have shown where pro-choicers wind up if they follow their<\/em> belief about fetuses to its logical end. They\u2019ve performed a public service. Could it be that medical ethicists really are more useful than aromatherapists?<\/p>\n

HT: The Weekly Standard<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Andrew Ferguson – The disgrace of medical ethics. On the list of the world\u2019s most unnecessary occupations\u2014aromatherapist, golf pro, journalism professor, vice president of the United States\u200b\u2014\u200bthat of medical ethicist ranks very high. They are happily employed by pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and other outposts of the vast medical-industrial combine, where their job is to … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":497,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[84,15,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-defense-of-innocence","category-moral-issues","category-sanctity-of-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/497"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7539\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}