By Dave Andrusko
We were just funning around, Dr. Francesca Minerva told the Sydney Morning Herald, when she and a colleague wrote that “We claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be.” That article—“After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?”—was “a theoretical and academic article,” she protested to the Herald. ”I didn’t mean to change any laws. I’m not in favour of infanticide. I’m just using logical arguments.”
Let’s kick the tires on that one before we kick newborns outside the community of protectable human beings.
At the heart of the argument is a constellation of ideas that Minerva and her colleague Alberto Giubilini argue are not new (which is true). It begins with that all or nothing premise: you have to meet [fill in the blank] criteria and then, perhaps, you are safe. And, oh by the way, we experts will decide what the criteria are. (Clearly basic human empathy did not make the cut.)
This elitism IS as old as time—and is a foolproof way of ensuring that category “x” is in deep, deep trouble.
So the Australia-based bioethicists Minerva and Giubilini tell us that “after-birth abortion” is an apt phrase, because the same reasons you abort, you ought to be able to cancel the package post-delivery, so to speak.
Neither the unborn child nor the newborn can be considered a “person” because neither has developed a sense of self and future.
“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,” they write. “It might start having expectations and develop a minimum level of self-awareness at a very early stage, but not in the first days or few weeks after birth.”
And of course they leave it up to neurologists and psychologists to figure out when that point is reached.
Okay, okay, but if the newborn is not a “person,” as Minerva and Giubilini define it, neither, obviously, is someone in a serious accident or older people in various stages of dementia, to name just two categories. But skip the slippery slope; they do.
The opening paragraph reads as follows:
“Severe abnormalities of the fetus and risks for the physical and/or psychological health of the woman are often cited as valid reasons for abortion. Sometimes the two reasons are connected, such as when a woman claims that a disabled child would represent a risk to her mental health. However, having 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. This could happen in the case of a woman who loses her partner after she finds out that she is pregnant and therefore feels she will not be able to take care of the possible child by herself.”
They allow as how some kids may slide through the prenatal screening net or could be injured being born. But to be clear, the kid doesn’t have to have disabilities to warrant being offed.
Likewise if she aborts because she lost her partner, by extrapolation she can remove this newborn non-person from the picture because she does not feel she can raise the kid by herself.
What about adoption?
“We also need to consider the interests of the mother who might suffer psychological distress from giving her child up for adoption,” they write. “It is true that grief and sense of loss may accompany both abortion and after-birth abortion [infanticide] as well as adoption, but we cannot assume that for the birthmother the latter is the least traumatic.”
And so forth and so on.
The journal editor says in the spirit of exchanging ideas he’d be open to an article that ran the argument backwards: if infanticide shouldn’t be legal, neither should abortion.
While I wouldn’t hold my breath on him following through, it would be interesting to see what would happen if they seriously contemplated the logic that Paul Stark ends his piece with: “Since there ARE no morally relevant differences between unborn and newborn human beings, and since newborns have a right to life, it then follows that unborn humans also have a right to life.”
Your feedback is very important to improving National Right to Life News Today. Please send your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you like, join those who are following me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/daveha