First, we kill all the newborns

William M. Briggs, Statistician » Academics—Who Else?—Call For The Killing Of Babies:

Academic philosophers Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva—shockingly working in Australia1, a land where commonsense was once held sacred—have written a peer-reviewed paper in which they say that killing newborns is A-OK, and even in some cases to be encouraged.

Their “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?” is in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

The academics argue that killing a newborn should be legally permissible because the baby could have been aborted and even if not, there is no "personhood" distinction between a fetus and a newly-born infant. Of course, observes Mr. Briggs, "They do not choose to call this killing infanticide, presumably because they are squeamish." Well, not very squeamish - the reason they do not use that word, I think, is because "infanticide" is a legal term for the unlawful killing of an infant, precisely the thing that G-M are arguing should not be illegal.

They begin by claiming that “having a child can itself be an unbearable burden” to a mother. Unbearable is that which cannot be born. It is an extreme word describing an impossibility and not an unlikelihood. Since a birth and the subsequent care of a child is a contingent event, we cannot claim that any birth and rearing is unbearable in advance. Even if it turns out unbearable in some instances, it is not always so and cannot be predicted to be so perfectly.

What this proposal really means is that not only should an abortion be available on demand by the woman for any reason she wants - for whom else could possibly decide what is "unbearable?" - she can also decide post-partum that she can abort retroactively, so to speak:

To answer my own question at the end of that post, G-M say that in fact there is no moral difference at all, and that not only are pre-delivery and partial-birth abortions quite okay, but so is taking the newborn baby and snuffing its life out.

But why stop there? I have long argued that the very same arguments pro-abortion advocates use to support abortion can be used to support capital punishment. We would simply no longer sentence convicts to death, we would simply perform a post-live-birth abortion. So what if the live birth was, say, 60 years ago?

And since “having a child can itself be an unbearable burden” to a mother, who can set moral limits on just when that burden becomes unbearable? The "burden" might be light for several years but then become unbearable after the child is still of minor age. Why not let the mother decide on "after-birth abortion" then? Consider these unbearable circumstances:

1. Child is perfectly healthy and normal until she is brain damaged in an auto accident at age 12 and in unable to dress or feed or bathe herself. Mom decides that this burden is unbearable. Abort? Why not?

2. Boy reaches age 14 and becomes rebellious and "wild" - finally becoming a drug addict and is finally arrested for assault and robbery. Cops call the mom to let her know and she replies, "This is unbearable. Just go ahead and abort him."

Briggs comments on this kind of question:

What contingent, measurable event turns the newborn baby into a human being? When it can talk and say, “I want”? Their lame response is “we do not put forward any claim about the moment at which after-birth abortion would no longer be permissible.”

Translation: "We do not see any meaningful point at which after-birth abortion would no longer be permissible."

At heart, the two academics are anti-human and specifically anti-child. At the outset they characterize parenthood (well, motherhood, since dads don't seem to exist in their ivory-tower minds) as a "burden" that is all too easily "unbearable." And so, of course, the children concerned should die.

That they should hold such a view is shocking enough, but even more disturbing is that apparently this very point of view is "not uncommon in bioethics."

And so we have arrived at what I can only characterize as moral arson with no comprehensibility.

Update: Discussion: Hot Air, Weasel Zippers, Verum Serum, LifeNews.com,Wake up America and Conservative Hideout 2.0, National Catholic Register, First Things.

Wheat and Weeds remarks,

Can you all please now agree that "Ethicist" is a bogus profession, existing for the sole purpose of rubber stamping whatever Mengelean wickedness we care to dream up?

Um, yes. Didn't used to be, though. One of my most subsequently-useful classes in seminary was ethics, but even in the ,latter 1990s at Vanderbilt, the subject was still taught from a classical tradition, starting with Aristotle and working up through the centuries to H. Reinhold Niebuhr.

Update: Reader P.S. writes,

In pagan times it was customary for the father to have the right to decide whether newborn children would live or die. Infants were generally killed because they were deformed in some way, and the most common method of killing unwanted newborns was exposure.

Now we have abortion on demand, for the mere convenience of the mother, not because of some deformity.

So:

Is the West returning to the evils of its pre-Christian past?

Babies were sacrificed to Baal (and other gods) in order to bring some benefit on the community.

Now we have babies sacrificed in order to bring some benefit to the mother. (Or to the community--see Steven Pinker's argument that abortion lowers the crime rate by reducing the number of unwanted children of poor mothers.)

I think one can argue that our bloody sacrifices, done for rationalistic utilitarian reasons, are morally inferior to the pagan sacrifices done in the service of ignorant superstitions: We are supposed to know better.

The next question must be: Is there anything that the West will not stoop to, for crass utililtarian advantage? Is everyone a candidate for sacrifice when it becomes convenient? Life is not sacred, and I get the impression that my liberal friends would not stand in my defense if that would endanger them--or even inconvenience them.

One could make a viciously bitter joke about those academics' argument for "post-birth abortion": Since abortion is sanctified under the cliche "a woman's right to choose", could one suggest, in a return to tradition, that the decision to kill newborns be left to the father as "a man's right to choose"? Or perhaps another one about how not so long ago it was "a white man's right to choose" whether a dark-skinned person was a human being or not.

Time to do something else; I'm too angry to go to bed right now.

The 21st-century human is not morally superior to his ancestors, and paganism is not a bad way to describe our growing spiritual and psychological dysfunctions.

Update: How exactly have G-M proposed anything different from "life unworthy of life?"