"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 foetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”In the UK abortion is legal up until the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy, although many might want to have the procedure before then. Whether or not the foetus can be described as a life from the moment of conception is debatable, however what is certain is that before the twenty-fourth week of the pregnancy the foetus is, for the most part, not covered or protected by law. However after the twenty-fourth week, and indeed after the birth it is legally covered whereupon any physical damage to the child will result in the person(s) responsible to be criminally charged.
Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”. They explained: “Both a foetus 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’.
“We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.”
As such they argued it was “not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to become a person in the morally relevant sense”.
The authors therefore concluded 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”."
So there is most certainly a difference between ending the life of a newborn and an abortion. One is legal, one is not and that is how it should stay.
To say that a newborn is "morally irrelevant" is itself.....irrelevant in contrast to the law. As much as these idiots might not like it for suiting their loony preferences and beliefs I much prefer it as it is.
If they had perhaps used tact and not in fact stated that killing newborns is no different to abortions then maybe, just maybe more people might have taken them seriously. Alas, that ship has sailed.
And here we have another group of intellectual idiots. Wonderful.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9113394/Killing-babies-no-different-from-abortion-experts-say.html
2 comments:
I personally don't think that after birth babies should be subject to any euthanasia.
But, I don't think that they're intellectual idiots at all.I can see their argument.
Just because the law says there is a difference, does not actually mean there is a difference. English law itself is very black and white. For example, I went to the Brentford County court recently, and had an opportunity to speak to a lawyer there. According to the law, there is a specific time period where one's illness 'stops'.Obviously, we know that's not true-particularly if this illness is of a mental nature.But, what this does show, is that the law can be very black and white.
That is really one of the many flaws within the law, which is why we cannot base the correctness of a statement, based on what the law says.
Weren't they making a point? That there is very little moral difference between a late abortion and the killing of a newborn and so if one is ok why not the other?
I'm DEFINITELY not anti-abortion but I do think it's more complex than the law sometimes makes it out to be.
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