By Dave Andrusko
Those of you who read NRL News Today on a consistent basis know it is almost impossible to keep up with the lethally crazy ideas so-called “bioethicists” crank out.
The Bioethics Establishment, ensconced in the best known think tanks, famous law schools, and as editors of elite medical journals, would recoil at such a characterization. They are not doing harm when they deprive “non-persons” (also known as “idiots,” the “subpersonal,” and those who do not lead “meaningful lives,” to name just three slurs) of food and water.
Most bioethicists will tell you that member of their ever-expanding pool of victims are “better off dead” (those with various degrees of cognitive injuries) or never really existed in the first place (the unborn and the newborn) because they lack the necessary qualities deemed by bioethicist to qualify as a “person.”
In a word, even before I came to National Right to Life, lo these many years ago, I knew that, by and large, the bioethics set was composed of some strange characters. There were, of course, notable exceptions. You think of Gilbert Meilaender and J. David Bleich and Wesley J. Smith, and John Keown, but they are few and far between.
I thought of all when I received a very courteous and thoughtful rebuttal of something I wrote about a bioethics pioneer whose forays into new territories found new candidates for dehumanization. I’m late to responding because I wish to give my rebuttal to his rebuttal some careful thought.
All this reminded me of something I once wrote about which appeared at the University of Oxford’s “Practical Ethics” blog.
Roger Crisp, the co-author, was and is a high mucky-muck in the bioethics-sphere. He was (and remains) a fellow and tutor in philosophy at St. Anne’s College, Oxford.
Along with his co-author, Crisp was pondering “Fetal Reduction in a Multiple Pregnancy: the Case of Identical Twins.” The question, at least for them, is whether there any difference between aborting a single baby (a “singleton”), and “fetal reduction” (aka “selective reduction”) when a mom is carrying more than one baby and “selectively” aborts one or more babies. (They pay virtually no attention to the variable they add in the title”: that the twins are identical. Interesting.)
Couple of points. First, they avoid the whole topic of sex-selective abortions where the reason to abort either a “singleton” or one of multiple babies is precisely because the baby is female. But, I understand, that is a separate topic.
Second, granted these are highfalutin’ “bioethicists,” but the way they construct their argument is massively confusing. But the bottom line isn’t. It’s actually straightforward.
The mother shouldn’t be thinking she is “playing God,” nor should the surviving baby feel guilty. Why?
In our view, the mother has no reason to be especially distressed, since, other things being equal, fetal reduction is ethically equivalent to a standard singleton abortion. To the extent that fetal reduction involves playing God, so does a singleton abortion. It is true that fetal reduction may involve a choice about which fetus is to survive, but singleton abortion involves a choice about whether or not a fetus is to survive, and these choices seem to be on a moral par.
So (a) if you abort one baby, you’re “playing God” no more or no less than aborting one of two twins which means (b) the mother shouldn’t feel “especially stressed.”
To put it bluntly, dead is dead.
And the mother also “has no reason to be especially distressed” based on how the death decision is made. That is, whether choosing “the less healthy fetus”; or because one of the babies is “easier” to remove; or the decision is left to the abortionist; or “is decided by the toss of a coin.”
Such is the detached, bloodless decision-making process courtesy of the academic Mt. Olympus.