Ethicists in the British Medical Journal have seriously and chillingly argued that what they call after birth abortions should be legal whenever an abortion in the womb would have been. As this article from the Daily Mail points out this argument fatally undermines the case for abortion itself:
“Ill come to why her argument is so important in a moment. First, the facts steel yourself – this is grim. Francesca Minerva, from Melbourne University and sometime of our very own Oxford, and her colleague Alberto Giubilini, argue in the British Medical Journal that after-birth abortion should be permissable in all cases that abortion is. As potential persons, newborn babies share the same moral status as foetuses, which are not actual persons, in that they have no sense of their own existence.It follows that infanticide should be legalised for babies with abnormalities not detected during pregnancy, which would otherwise have qualified for abortion, and by the same token for those which would have been aborted because their parents could not materially or psychologically cope with a child.I suggest that most people reading the previous paragraphs will resile from that proposition in disgust and disbelief. But why? If newborn babies havent developed any material consciousness beyond what they had in the womb, why not dispose of them in the same way? In this context, the term-limits for abortion of foetuses seem entirely arbitrary, based on the squeamishness of we who are born rather than the actual or potential humanity of the unborn.”
via Killing newborn babies is perfectly logical – thats the problem | Mail Online.
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