It starts with a trickle, and the trickle becomes a stream, and the stream becomes a river.
And then the river becomes a flood:
Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are “morally irrelevant” and ending their lives is no different to abortion, a group of medical ethicists linked to Oxford University has argued.
The article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born…
The article, entitled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?”, was written by two of Prof Savulescu’s former associates, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva.
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.”
Oxford’s motto is “Dominus Illuminatio Mea“, which is Latin for “The Lord is my Light.”
Might be time for a change up.
It’s a tiny, tiny leap from abortion, to death panels to the Nazi’s T-4 “euthanasia” program. Sadly history repeats as tragedy then as farce.
Even my liberal friends–who scoffed at my concerns about babies who had been unsuccessfully aborted and then left on a towel room shelf to die (the testimony before Obama’s Illinois state Senate Committtee) looked at this and said, “That’s too much. Moral nitwits etc.”
And yet–if we can talk about mutually assured nuclear destruction–we can also talk about the morality of such things as these. Its not just abortion/killing babies etc; it also involves end of life questions and issues.
To say that the moral thicket is very thorny is not to say that one should never go in it. You don’t confront and defeat the reprehensible without discussing the issues.