Medical Ethics, Eugenics and “Post Birth Abortion”

The left has returned to its eugenics roots. An increasing number of leftists support the idea of a so-called post birth abortion (read: infanticide). The British Journal of Medical Ethics event went so far as to publish an article supporting such “abortions.” The progressive left loved eugenics during the first half of the 20th century. Leftists from Margaret Sanger, Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to Adolph Hitler supported creating a master race through eugenics. Those “undesirables” who polluted the master race were to be sterilized or killed. This is what happens when “ethics” separates itself from basic Christianity.

Thou shalt not murder must actually mean something in order for eugenics to be repugnant. As we get further and further into our post-Christian society it should surprise us not when medical “ethics” begins to argue with killing babies, be it born or unborn. It’s bad enough that Christians have had to defend the right to life of an unborn baby, now we must defend the right of the born to live. This includes any child with a disability, including those with down’s syndrome.

Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva wrote the article. They said:

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….

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’.

In short, a born baby is a potential person but it isn’t a person and thus isn’t subject to a right to life. Would any child with a disability become a “person” and thus subject to a right to life according to the authors of this article? I would suspect not, thus it would be justified in their minds to murder anyone with down’s syndrome or some other major disability.

The “ethicists” didn’t stop there:

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….

…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.

It’s quite clear then isn’t it? Any newborn, healthy or otherwise, is not capable of being a person. So any newborn could be murdered in accordance with Giubilini and Minerva’s “ethics.” Presumably at some point a baby can place value on its life and one would assume that whenever that undefined point comes then it would be unethical to murder the child. Until then Giubilini and Minerva play the linguistic game, calling infanticide a “post birth abortion.” Of course since a child with a mental disability will never be able to place “value” on its own life they can be murdered at any point.

The left has returned to eugenics. They have made human life meaningless and irrelevant. It starts with the mentally disable, they lose their right to life. Next it applies to races. When Japan occupied parts of China they did grotesque medical experiments on the “non-human” Chinese. They called them logs, their life was irrelevant. Hitler killed any German whose genes he deemed a threat to the master race. The Soviets routinely murdered the mentally incompetent, to say nothing of the so-called enemies of the people.

Once we go down the road of accepting the murder of innocent human life it leads to mass murder. If we can manipulate ethics to justify the “ethical” murder of one group of people then we can manipulate ethics to justify any murder. That’s what happened in the 20th century. The left hasn’t learned its lesson, they’re setting us up for another round of unimaginable death. They’ve already done this with abortion, now they’re going after the born.

This is why we need a basic moral absolute. The Christian faith gives us this via the 10 Commandments. It is wrong to murder innocent. It doesn’t matter if the baby has this problem or that problem, it doesn’t matter if the person has this disease or that disease. It also doesn’t matter if a baby is a particular race or born into a particular religion. All innocent people are entitled to a right to life under the Christian faith. When so-called ethics moves away from this basic principle and when ethics begins to redefine what a life is or what a person is, they’re setting us up for mass murder.

We must not accept this in any way shape or form. We must never accept the government allowing mothers to murder their own children without consequences. We must never accept the government murdering innocent people, no matter their infirmity, race or religion. Giubilini and Minerva, along with other leftists, are taking us down the path of mass murder. We’ve been here before a century ago. We cannot let this happen again.