Editor’s note. This editorial appears in the February/March issue of National Right to Life News, the second entirely online edition of the “pro-life newspaper of record.” You can read the entire issue—and pass it along to friends—at www.nrlc.org/uploads/NRLNews/NRLNewsFebMar2014.pdf
[Last week] I was jumping around the Web when I ran across a column at Slate.com which, to put it politely, was as whiny as it was peculiar. The gist was that the story of “after-birth abortions” (infanticide) had just resurfaced two years after this author (along with yours truly and thousands of others) had first talked about the essay. “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?” had appeared in February 2012 in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
I wrote about the essay so many times, I won’t belabor how two Australian “bioethicists,” Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, came to the daft conclusion 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.”
Besides Andrew Ferguson already boiled their thesis down in a brilliant piece that ran in the May 2012 edition of The Weekly Standard: “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’s hung around a bit too long.”
Back to our friend who was incensed that (a) “Now the right-wing echo-sphere is passing the story around as though it’s new,” and (b) its membership had misrepresented his position (he was not nearly as hard on Giubilini and Minerva as he appears to believe he was, but….).
Now it goes without saying that treating two-year-old news as if it were, so to speak, hot off the presses, is sloppy. Likewise it also goes without saying, that turning someone into a proponent of infanticide when he is not (even though his counter-argument to Giubilini and Minerva was weak) is unjust.
But that is only to state the obvious. Let’s ask a different (and more interesting) question coming from a different angle.
Back almost exactly two years ago, would anyone (except the deep thinkers who write for journals such as the Journal of Medical Ethics) have anticipated that any country—even Belgium!—would have removed all age restrictions on whom can “access euthanasia” (as two Australian bioethicists put it)?
We’re talking about children of any age who can be euthanized provided the usual boxes are checked off. And this creepy expansion came about even though popularizers of assisted suicide for teens and adults admit there are already problems (abuses) galore. So what? Let’s double down and extend this “right” to everyone.
Two years ago would we have anticipated an ever-mounting number of newborns stuffed into garbage bags and tossed into dumpsters? Would anyone—anyone—have believed that when security at Victoria’s Secret in New York City’s Herald Square stopped a girl suspected of shoplifting they would find a dead baby in the teenager’s shopping bag?
Two years ago would we have anticipated the British publication “The Daily Mail” running a story this week which claimed that 66 babies survived abortion attempts in one year alone?
Would we have been surprised, two years ago, to learn that boyfriends nowadays are becoming more and more sophisticated in their plots to kill their unborn children? That the most famous—the recently convicted Andrew Welden—would forge a prescription for a drug that induces abortion, scratch off the label and relabeled it as a common antibiotic, and then tell his pregnant girlfriend that his physician father said she had an infection and should take the mislabeled medication?
You get the message, of course. While it is silly, even stupid, to recycle old news as if it is breaking news, it is also true that what was almost unimaginable just a few years ago is now an ugly reality, with worse in the offing.
Let me end quickly but with an all-important point. There is only one non-partisan, trans-denominational, single-issue countervailing force. And that the Pro-Life Movement of which National Right to Life and its 50 state affiliates have been the standard bearer going back to the late 1960s.
Please, be sure to read National Right to Life News and NRL News Today, found at www.nationalrighttolifenews.org, and pass this vitally important information along to pro-life friends and family. Make the time every day to visit NRLC’s webpage at www.nrlc.org.
I can’t emphasize enough how much will be taking place over the next nine months that will affect unborn children and the medically dependent.
Come here and become equipped to meet the challenges.