Journal of Medical Ethic’s article proposes the killing of newborns
Two prominent Australian philosophers created a firestorm of outrage recently by arguing that killing newborn children is morally equivalent to abortion, and that mother’s rights trumped the rights of their unwanted infants. While the argument may be the next logical step for a society that promotes the destruction of developing children in the womb, the article produced a vehemently negative response from the general public.
Monash University’s Alberto Giubilini and the University of Melbourne’s Francesca Minerva published the article “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?” in the Feb 23, 2012 online version of the prestigious Journal of Medical Ethics. The article raised not a few hairs on a few necks and earned the authors death threats amidst the stream of angry responses.
In the article, the ethicists made the case that sometimes unsuspecting mothers will give birth to disabled children, whom they might have aborted had they known of the babies’ disabilities before birth. Since these children have as yet no awareness of the lives they are losing, the mothers should have the freedom to cut short their unwanted babies’ lives in an “after-birth abortion.” (As long as the execution is painless.) The authors make a point of calling the practice “after-birth abortion” and not “infanticide” because they equate it morally with the killing of a fetus rather than a child. They also reject the term “euthanasia” since the mother and not the child is the focus of concern.
In a contorted sense, the authors are right. There is little real difference in killing a child inside the womb rather than outside the womb. The few inches of distance from the uterus to the outside world has little bearing on the nature of the action. A human child is alive, and then she is dead. In neither case did she die as a natural result of her developmental abnormalities; she died because her mother made a decision.
Giubilini and Minerva could be roasted for suggesting that the lives of developmentally abnormal children have less value than others, drawing an outcry from the disabled community, except that the authors did not stop there. They said mothers should be allowed to kill their healthy newborns as well.