Journal of Medical Ethics suggests parents should have right to murder their newborn babies, claiming it is same as abortion

Thursday, April 12, 2012 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer
Tags: Medical ethics, newborn babies, abortion

(NaturalNews) Since abortion on-demand is legal throughout most of the First World, the next logical step in the minds of some of the world's pseudo-intellectual elite is to legalize the murder of babies after they are born as well. A new article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics (JME) suggests that parents should be able to choose whether or not they want to murder their children after birth because these tiny individuals apparently do not yet possess a "moral right to life," and are thus not actually "persons."

Alberto Giubilini, from The University of Milan, and Francesca Minerva, a post-doctoral fellow at The University of Melbourne's Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics make their case in a paper entitled After-birth abortion: why should the baby live? that if abortion is legal, then infanticide should be legal. And this argument is based on their philosophical assessment that the two forms of murder are virtually the same thing from an ethical perspective.

"Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus' health," write the authors in their abstract. "[T]he authors argue 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."

As reprehensible as this notion is, the authors have a point in likening abortion to infanticide -- they are technically the same thing. After all, what makes a baby inside the womb any less of a person than a baby outside the womb? According to current standards, the baby is still a "fetus" during the few moments before delivery, but once outside the birth canal magically transforms into a person, a dubious double-standard that the authors appear to be targeting.

On the other hand, it seems clear by their own arguments that both Giubilini and Minerva, as well as JME editor Julian Savulescu from Oxford University's Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, actually support the idea of murdering newborn babies, and are not simply pointing out the logical fallacy of allowing abortion but restricting infanticide.

"The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual," wrote the two authors in an utterly disgusting and dehumanizing defense of their position. "Rather than being 'actual persons, newborns were 'potential persons."

Sources for this article include:

http://jme.bmj.com

http://www.telegraph.co.uk

http://www.christianpost.com