Journal of Medical Ethics supports “after birth abortions” and “euthanasia”

Since the revelations stemming from the Dr. Kermit Gosnell trial many are asking: How this could have happened?  Perhaps a review of a paper published in the Journal of Medical Ethics in 2012 by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva titled, “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?” will answer this question.

The abstract reads:

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the 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.

Giubilini and Minerva state, “Sometimes the two reasons are connected, such as when a woman claims that a disabled child would represent a risk to her mental health. However, having a child can itself be an unbearable burden for the psychological health of the woman or for her already existing children, regardless of the condition of the fetus. This could happen in the case of a woman who loses her partner after she finds out that she is pregnant and therefore feels she will not be able to take care of the possible child by herself.”

Single parenthood is an ethical justification for euthanasia.

“[W]e need to assess facts in order to decide whether the same arguments that apply to killing a human fetus can also be consistently applied to killing a newborn human,” write Giubilini and Minerva. They note, “Euthanasia in infants has been proposed by philosophers for children with severe abnormalities whose lives can be expected to be not worth living and who are experiencing unbearable suffering.”

Giubilini and Minerva write, “[W]e propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion’, rather than ‘infanticide’”

Giubilini and Minerva appear to be making the ethical case for Eugenics.

 

Memorial plaque in North Carolina to victims of Eugenics.

Nora Sullivan, a Charlotte Lozier Institute Research Assistant, writes, “In his book War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, New York Times bestselling author Edwin Black paints one of the most complete pictures to date of the history of the eugenics movement in America. In this remarkable work, originally published in 2003 and expanded in 2012, Black chronicles a shameful period in modern American history, which has cast a long and lasting shadow across our country’s record on human rights.”

“Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the eugenics movement in the United States was the amount of support that it found and the fervor with which it was put forward by its advocates. Those who professed the eugenic gospel were not the uneducated and uncouth. They were not led by a narrow worldview and limited access to information. Rather, they were the academics who led at the nation’s most prestigious institutions, the leaders who shaped the policy of the country, and the progressives with opportunities to make positive changes. They truly were the elites of America.”, notes Sullivan.

Have we returned to that period in American history where the infirm, the poor, the minorities are the targets of a “new Eugenics movement“?

Sullivan writes, “Despite the fact that proponents of eugenics thought they were working for a better world, their work became brutish as it advocated only for the good of a very select few.  The horrific result was 60,000 Americans who were forcibly sterilized through state-sponsored eugenics programs that forever ruined countless lives.”

In the 1932 dystopian novel,“Brave New World” Aldous Huxley wrote that:

“In politics the equivalent of a fully developed scientific theory or philosophical system is a totalitarian dictatorship. In economics, the equivalent of a beautifully composed work of art is the smoothly running factory in which the workers are perfectly adjusted to the machines. The Will to Order can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clear up a mess. The beauty of tidiness is used as a justification for despotism.”

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