When confronted with the story of the prom mom who killed her child, pro-lifers sarcasticly referred to it as a 4th trimester abortion.  “If you can kill them before birth,” we asked, “why not after?  Isn’t it just another form of abortion?”

We were being sarcastic.  The pro-aborts were incredulous.  How could we possibly suggest that the moral status of a preborn child was equal to that of the born child?

As it turns out, one man’s sarcasm is another man’s policy proposal.

In a paper published by the Journal of Medical Ethics, Alberto Giubilini (Department of Philosophy, University of Milan) and Francesca Minerva (Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, University of Melbourne) are now saying, “Yes, the pro-lifers are correct.  There is no difference between the moral status of a preborn child and that of an infant.  So we can kill the infants, also!”  (Source here.)  They wrote:

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.  This means that many non-human animals and mentally retarded human individuals are persons, but that all the individuals who are not in the condition of attributing any value to their own existence are not persons.

***

If criteria such as the costs (social, psychological, economic) for the potential parents are good enough reasons for having an abortion even when the fetus is healthy, if the moral status of the newborn is the same as that of the infant and if neither has any moral value by virtue of being a potential person, then the same reasons which justify abortion should also justify the killing of the potential person when it is at the stage of a newborn.

Well, there you have it.

The big question is this: What will you do about it?  One suggestion: Please help us storm the gates of the Culture of Death.  Please give sacrificially so we can combat the Culture of Death, before it destroys our next generation.  If you won’t, who will?  For the sake of your sons and daughters, and also your nieces and nephews, please help us turn back the tide of death.

Tags: Alberto Giubilini, Francesca Minerva, Journal of Medical Ethics, prom mom

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 29th, 2012 at 7:17 pm and is filed under Pro Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.