Tweet
When I first started reading this I thought it had to be a joke.. Sadly it is not. I do have to say.. My thought does agree with them that killing a fetus and a Newborn baby is essentially the same. Which is why I am against abortion in the first place.
In this article (Written for the Journal of Medical Ethics ) it concludes they (A Baby) are not a "Person" but a "Human being" and define the distinction as one as a contributing member of society and the other is not..
As a society have we lost our moral compass so badly that such articles are written and the definition of ethics steers so far of course that we would in fact call this ethical?? I find this alarming that such an opinion is out there on this..
Some excerpts from the article:
This one made me ill..
Link to article:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/he...perts-say.html
In this article (Written for the Journal of Medical Ethics ) it concludes they (A Baby) are not a "Person" but a "Human being" and define the distinction as one as a contributing member of society and the other is not..
As a society have we lost our moral compass so badly that such articles are written and the definition of ethics steers so far of course that we would in fact call this ethical?? I find this alarming that such an opinion is out there on this..
Some excerpts from the article:
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’.
“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.”
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’.
“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.”
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”.
They also argued that parents should be able to have the baby killed if it turned out to be disabled without their knowing before birth, for example citing that “only the 64 per cent of Down’s syndrome cases” in Europe are diagnosed by prenatal testing.
Once such children were born there was “no choice for the parents but to keep the child”, they wrote.
“To bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care.”
They also argued that parents should be able to have the baby killed if it turned out to be disabled without their knowing before birth, for example citing that “only the 64 per cent of Down’s syndrome cases” in Europe are diagnosed by prenatal testing.
Once such children were born there was “no choice for the parents but to keep the child”, they wrote.
“To bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care.”
They preferred to use the phrase “after-birth abortion” rather than “infanticide” to “emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus”.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/he...perts-say.html
Comment