NOTICE: The following
article is written by the author itself and not by me, I am not trying to
violate their copyright. I will give some information on them.
PAGE TITLE: http://www.nationalreview.com/
ARTICLE TITLE: The Pro-Life, Pro-Infanticide
Consensus
DATE: Wednesday 29 February
2012
AUTHOR: Jonah Goldberg
AUTHOR
INFORMATION: Jonah Jacob Goldberg (born March 21,
1969) is an American conservative syndicated columnist and author. Goldberg is
known for his contributions on politics and culture to National Review
Online, of which he is editor-at-large. He is the author of Liberal
Fascism (2008), which reached #1 on the New York Times Best Seller
list. He appears on such television programs as Special Report with Bret
Baier, Good Morning America, Nightline, Hardball with
Chris Matthews, Real Time with Bill Maher, Larry King Live, Your
World with Neil Cavuto and most recently the Glenn Beck Program and The
Daily Show with Jon Stewart. From 2006 to 2010 he was a frequent
participant on bloggingheads.tv.
 |
| Jonah Goldberg |
Via
a particularly excellent Best of the Web column
today, I learned that a prominent group of “ethicists” at Oxford University has
concluded that, in the words of the Telegraph: “Parents should be allowed to
have their newborn babies killed because they are ‘morally irrelevant’ and
ending their lives is no different to abortion.” The
article continues:
The
article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, says newborn babies are
not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics
also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns
out to be disabled when it is born.
The journal’s editor, Prof Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, said the article’s authors had received death threats since publishing the article. He said those who made abusive and threatening posts about the study were “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society”.
The
article, entitled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?”, was
written by two of Prof Savulescu’s former associates, Alberto Giubilini and
Francesca Minerva.
They argued: “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.”
Rather
than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”. They explained:
“Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons,
but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.
Now,
my hunch is that for the vast majority of the civilized — and, frankly,
uncivilized — world, the only thing these authors have demonstrated is their
own “moral irrelevance.”
There’s
so much that can be said about this, it’s difficult to know where to begin.
Many abortion opponents in the 1970s argued that legalizing abortion opened the
door to a slippery slope where people would start advocating infanticide. Such
arguments were greeted by many pro-abortion rights activists as paranoid and
extreme. But lo and behold, they were absolutely right. When you lift one
taboo, it is difficult to plant a new one that everyone will agree on. Now the
growing Peter Singer caucus is encroaching ever more deeply into the
mainstream. It’s a disgusting, reprehensible and evil turn of events.
But
that much should be obvious to most people. What I find interesting, though of
much lesser importance I concede, is the intriguing consensus between the two “extremes.”
Ardent prolifers consider abortion evil because they believe — broadly speaking
— aborting a fetus is morally akin to killing a baby (the two acts are not
necessarily always identical, as Ramesh explains in his brilliant but
under-appreciated book The Party of Death, but close enough for purposes of
discussion).
The
“ethicists” essentially agree, as a categorical matter. Killing a baby is akin to aborting a
fetus — so go ahead and kill babies! In other words if you place no moral
weight on a fetus, they argue, you should place no moral weight on a newborn
either. Conversely if you invest enormous moral weight to a newborn, argue the
pro-lifers, you should invest at least some moral weight in a fetus as well.
The
moral difference in worldview is total, but the terms and logic are remarkably
similar.
While
I think their argument is beyond repugnant, the “ethicists” are providing a
valuable service insofar as they are making plain the logic supporting
abortion.
I
don’t support death threats, never mind murder plots, but the self-righteous
shock of the ethicists at the response to their argument is deliciously
asinine. James Taranto writes, “people who issue death threats in
response to an academic article are indeed ‘fanatics opposed to the very values
of a liberal society.’ But so are people who write or publish academic articles
arguing in favor of the murder of children.”
I
wouldn’t even go that far. People who issue these death threats are wrong to do
so, but their outrage is understandable, even healthy. For a liberal society
that loses its capacity to be disgusted by cold-blooded arguments for
infanticide has lost its ability to sustain and nurture freedom itself.
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