Shocking article considers whether babies have 'moral right to life'. WARNING: distressing content

[chandellina]

following on last week's abortion thread, anyone care to jump in on this one?

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.

Telegraph story

well technically they are correct.

Killing a foetus which had the potential to life is no different to killing a baby months later.

one is easier to justify though because you cannot see it or relate it to being a person yet.

Is that a real article?

It's campaigning for anti-abortion from a different angle

I can understand the logic, it's not that shocking, or that big a step tbh. But then I would fully support abortion up until term and assisted death...

this has actually really upset me!!!! that someone can even contemplate killing a newborn with downs............................I can see why this has upset people

Abortion debate aside, one of the ways 'success' is measured in academia is by citation index. A paper like this will lead to 100's of citations. Deliberately controversial, yes. Citationcount through the roof, will be.

Plenty of people have no objection to killing an unborn baby with Down's sadly.

The whole point of an ethics board is to debate, as MyName just said.

They aren't proposing people actually do it. Just saying it's not unethical to consider it.

In the wild it's called culling. And most animals do it to their young.

They are playing devil's advocate.

This is one of the rare threads where its reasonable and relevent to envoke Goodwin's law and mention the Nazis.

I believe that in Holland after birth abortions are carried out.

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6621588/ns/health-childrens_health/t/netherlands-grapples-euthanasia-babies/

Interesting article and on an academic view it makes a number of valid points, although seems to ignore the key factor that a newborn lives independently whereas a fetus does not along with the reality that "abortion" or in real terms euthanasia is practised in relation to severely ill/disabled newborns.

I am possibly, for the first time ever, going to have to hide this thread.

It doesn't make sense to me - terminating a foetus is quite different as it can't exist outside the womb until after a certain time - 28 plus weeks.

But killing (and not terminating) a newborn is killing a person which can thrive outside the womb with anyone feeding it (including a child with disabilities)

As I recall Jonathan Glover's classic moral philosophy text "Causing Death and Saving Lives" comes down in favour of a sliding scale of moral relevance for foeticide/infanticide, and he chaired an EU commission on the ethics of embryo research - once you look into the cutting edge of moral philosophy you're going to hear some things at odds with conventional wisdom, and some very upsetting things as well - it's in the nature of the field and it's not (always) done purely to shock.

why out this in AIBU ffs.

I remember being told disabled babies should be drowned at birth

We can view the article however we like but it's very unlikely to change UK legislation so hardly worth getting into a spin over. Personally I'm in agreement with Babydubs but neither she nor I make the rules either.

I'm with rhondajean

My mum used to be a midwife. She had known a couple of older midwives who had practiced in the middle decades of the twentieth century. She told me that back then, it was far from unusual for a midwife to quickly smother a badly deformed child after a homebirth. the parents would be told the child was stillborn.

ok, sorry, I know it is shocking. There was a debate last week around the same issues (disability, rights of unborn baby) so I thought it was relevant here. I can understand it is distressing though.

ok, we're moved. distressing only to the well-read now.

oh you do , are you distressed?
I for the life of me can't think why anyone would want to start a thread this horrid.

Yep, it's just an ethics debate. You know, testing the limits, sustaining a position over contexts, slippery slope stuff. Not very big or clever, IMO, but there you go. I do find the headline irresponsible, though - it implies that somebody with authority and an ability to enforce change might be listening to this seriously.

silverbay - my grandmother had a baby who died at or soon after birth. She said to me, "They told me it was born dead, but I knew it wasn't - I saw it was alive. They saw there was something wrong with it so just took it off to the sluice room and finished it off". When I expressed my shock and sympathy, she said, "Oh no, it was much the best thing. That was how things were in those days." Shocking in a modern context, but I think that many people of her generation did accept that.