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

The masses need to question a lot more, sure. But that means discussing stuff that's a bit upsetting and a bit icky, not just going, ooh, waa, how dare you mention it.

I agree it has to be discussed, otherwise the masses won't know what the "experts" are thinking and won't be able to resist them.

"It is a murky ethical area (how comfortable are you really with the idea of a child born with its internal organs outside its body, which can
only be saved by operation after operation and even then it might well die within weeks...) which is what makes it worth debating." I do think there is some validation in some of those arguments, however, I think there's a line between say, withdrawing life-saving treatment, thus enabling a baby to die peacefully if that is what is meant, and actively killing that baby, iyswim.

There have, iirc been two fairly high profile cases recently where babies were allowed to die after being kept alive by artificial means, and who would never have lived independently of life support, within the confines of a hospital, where the courts ruled that life support should be withdrawn. Even that is a deeply merky ethical debate, however I can see the case for withdrawing life support more clearly than that of actively ending the life, iyswim.

As for the debate as to whether all life is covered, yes theoretically it might be, but ask any person about this, and most would say that it is of course wrong to kill a healthy newborn, but there are many who would argue that in the right circumstances there could be an argument to end the life of a baby with disabilities.

SolidGoldBrass - Born with their organs outside of their bodies could have either one of two conditions:

1)Gastroschisis, which often only requires one operation, which is usually successful and babies will generally have an excellent prognosis and a perfectly normal life. So not a life of doom and misery.

2)Exomphalos, half of babies with may have genetic defects to their heart, lungs or kidneys to varying degrees of severity. Mortality rates for exomphalos used to be very high, but due to improved surgical techniques and medical care, these have improved greatly.

Which brings us to another issue: if we don't try, we won't progress. If babies with the above condition were just given palliative care at birth, the medical advances would not have been made at all.

Another thought. If your child is involved in car accident they may will require many, many surgeries and have a lifetime of pain ahead of them. Yet, unless they were clinically braindead, you would be unlikely to be in a position to withdraw care. Yet people generally don't talk about euthanising children in the same way that they do for euthanising infants. Therein lies the crux of the debate in the article about the personhood of infants.

Actually there's a huge amount of academic literature about neo-natal infanticide, including some excellent analyses of the tone of the various debates.

I personally think this article's authors need to situate their arguments more in a clearer historical setting, rather than focus on the modern medico-legal specificity, because that would have more cultural value. But hey, that's just me.

GAG, isn't there quite a lot of discussing about euthanazing people who are in persistent vegetative states no matter what their age? And isn't it worth discussing whether it's better or worse to decide to withdraw food/hydration from someone in such a situation, or to give them a shot of postassium chloride?

The whole euthanasia issue is worth discussing. Anyone who isn't witlessly sentimental, too superstitious to be capable of rational argument or too fortunate, so far, to have witnessed or had to deal with a loved one in severe and unfixable pain or irreversible coma, must at least have speculated about where the boundaries should lie.

You can have severe injuries requiring multiple surgeries and causing great pain and not be in a persistent vegetative state, so my point still stands.

But it's worrying that you claimed the conditions I described would only lead to a life of pain, when they are both curable. For all the public's fixation with health and medical matters, there is still a lot of ignorance out there.

I'm not even going to bother with your second paragraph. As if only atheists speculate about euthanasia.

GAG: 'curable' is not necessarily an objective term. Do you mean that they are always curable via simple procedures, or that a percentage of those who are operated on survive? Some people survive being shot in the head, but most don't.

I wouldn't disagree with you that the superstitious speculate about euthanasia. My point is that it's difficult to debate with superstitous people because they tend to depart from the rational and bring in their imaginary friend when they are losing the debate.

They are congenital defects that can usually be rectified, yes. Here are some links:

www.uhs.nhs.uk/OurServices/Childhealth/Neonatalsurgery/Conditionswetreat/Exomphalos.aspx

www.uhs.nhs.uk/OurServices/Childhealth/Neonatalsurgery/Conditionswetreat/Gastroschisis.aspx

Something like Hirschsprungs could lead to as many operations and negative effects, but because it's not a defect people can visualise, it doesn't appear on the Oh noes list the way a visible congenital abnormality does. Again, people's perceptions are often not from a place of knowledge.

Also, I'm not sure how to break it to you, but hospitals, where a lot of these critical decisions are made, are not hotbeds of atheism, if you removed all the "superstitious" from them, they would be understaffed to the point of non function. People can be religious and make balanced ethical decisions.

Take word disabled out and put black . Would this still be allowed to be discussed on here or even considered . Imagine baby being born and someone saying well they are the wrong colour . Get rid

Nope that not go down well . Infact I suspect MNHQ would delete the thread as racist but what the heck were meant to educate not get upset when people are talking about whether it is right to murder children like ours

What point is a child to disabled who has the right to say anything or judge and certainly no one who has ever been in the postion of having a child with disabilities

GAG: A quick look at one of those links suggests that these conditions occur (not unlike cleft palate) in varying degrees eg mild, moderate or severe. I can't remember the exact name but there was a case some years ago of a baby born with a very severe case of gastroschisis that basically had operation after operation and died. It was discussed at the time whether the continued treatment was a good or a bad thing, both in terms of prolonging the suffering of baby (and parents) and in terms of NHS resources.

And, you know, resources do have to come into it. No resources are infinite. And complicated costly procedures with little or no chance of success can take away resources from other procedures which have higher chances of success.

Solid so you get sick your quite happy someone say no your going to cost to much .

It should never be about resources . Basically your saying someone costs to much should murder them

Fecking he'll I better watch out for the kill squard then :( . No gang in I'm an adult so it's ok

The NHS already does decide which drugs and treatments it will fund (for adults) based on the cost relative to the expected outcome.

I've now read the article and it would be difficult to follow it's arguments as it makes too many assumptions about ideas that, to be fair, are very well known in the philosophical literature. So if anyone's interested here is the backround to the article:
(you may feel my tone in the following is quite patronizing in which case I apologize, it is not intended this way. I merely presenting these ideas as I would to my students in case anyone is interested. Normally we would engage in dialogue rather than me just laying out the ideas, but that's not easy online!):

Take 'person' to be a techinical terms that means someone of moral importance, someone who's life ought to be protected, who should not be subjected to pain and suffering, who should be treated with dignity and respect. Assume that the adult, able-minded human is the paradigmatic case of a person.

Are the following persons?

1. a chimp
2. a 14 day old embryo
3. a chicken
4. a bacterium
5. an alien
6. a tree

(add whatever you want to the list)

We cannot decide whether the beings above are persons unless we first identify the criterion(a) of personhood, i.e. in virtue of what characteristic, ability or feature does one qualify as a person? What that characteristic might be is a matter of discussion...

TBC

Isn't a person just a human being? It doesn't matter whether they are adult or not or "able-minded" or not.

Cont...

Candidates for the criterion of personhood:

1. Being the subject of a life: a good prospect because there is something impressive about the very idea of life - we don't know how it is possible, we can't replicate it, so perhaps it is due special moral respect. Problems: who is alive? Are bacteria alive? If yes this becomes a very demanding view, e.g. you would not only have to be a vegetarian but couldn't take antibiotics, would have to sweep the ground in front of your feet, etc.

1. Being human: this is a popular view but there is little justification for it. Why are humans special rather than felines or canines? One possible answer is that humans have souls, and this works well enough if you believe in a god that endowed us with souls and made us special, but philosophers don't like these kinds of arguments as they are conditional on a belief in god (all you need to deny the argument is to say you don't believe in god). Other than this it is difficult to see why humans are special and other animals are not. Singer calls this view 'speciecist' and compares it to racism, so if racism is the view that one race is better than another based on arbitrary characteristics (e.g. skin colour), speciecism is the view that one species is better than another based on arbitrary charcteristics (e.g. it is my species). Problems: this view does seem intuitively implausible. We do seem to have stronger psychological connections to our species and it's not entirely clear that we should work to break these.

1. Being intelligent: a promising view since the whole of philosophy is based on the power of reason. Note that is has interesting conclusions: an adult chimp has much greater reasoning powers than an early human embryo and would turn out to be a person in this view, whereas the early human embryo would miss out. Problems: this criterion seems entirely arbitrary. Yes we are all intelligent to different degrees, but why should this characteristic be relevant to our moral status?

The list continues with characteristics such as sentience or the ability to be moral being put forward by different authors.

TBC

Is a foetus a human being/person? If not immediately, at what point does it become one?

What about a mutant ape that displayed extra intelligence?

What if we encountered aliens? They wouldn't be humans but would they be persons?

Saying "a person is a human being" is far too simplistic.

'Why are humans special rather than felines or canines?'

Aren't these the type of questions that greens like Peter Singer would ask? Isn't it obvious why human beings are different. The sustainability of the dung beetle is not as important as the sustainability of a human being. Human beings are special, they are not just animals like any other.

1 - Why are human beings special?
2 - Important to who? To us? Well of course we think humans are special.

I am not familiar with the other papers of the authors of this argument, but here is how one view on personhood can end up justifying infanticide:

1. A person is a being with interests where the fundamental interest is to avoid pain and seek pleasure. All beings with the capacity to feel pain and pleasure (with the relevant neurological pre-requisites qualify), and a 'unit' of pain (imagine that we can quantify pain in this way) counts the same no matter who is experiencing is (e.g. one 'unit' of headache is as bad for a chimp as it is for me as it is for the alien). Now some beings will have more interests than others, e.g. aesthetic interests, the pursuit of knowledge, the appreciation of good food are interests that not all animals have, but this doesn't mean that one being in itself matters more than another. To decide between beigns we compare interests.

So for example: suppose an adult human being requires an organ which is only available from a pig, you compare the interests of the two. The pig will experience pain and lose its life in the process of harvesting an organ but as it has little sense of self and no sense of the future it's psychological pain. Compared to the human who has a sense of loss, an understanding of the future, etc. it's clear that the human 'wins' - the human has more interests than the pig.

However humans do not always win in this comparison. An adult chimp may have a lot more interests (appreciation of family ties, social connections, etc) than a severely disabled human being.

A foetus also comes up with few interests. Prior to the creation of a nervous system the embryo cannot even experience pain. That means that it is not a person and therefore not of moral importance.

If you conclude on a criterion of personhood that is not possessed by foetuses, infants, lower animals, etc. then these beings are not persons and can be used in the interests of other persons. E.g. a mother has an interest in taking a holiday and is permitted in killing an infant that gets in the way of her taking this holiday (this is a purposefully exaggerated example!).

"Isn't it obvious" is not an acceptable philosophical argument! :)

Personally I don't agree with the above views but not because they are 'obviously' wrong.

'Saying "a person is a human being" is far too simplistic.'

But the overcomplication of categorising some infants as not human beings leads to the type of thinking of "ethicists" like Peter Singer, where animals may sometimes be viewed as equal to some humans.

That's how philosophy works. You have to have logic, not just a feeling.

If your lack of logic makes your life easier than it's fine to live your life that way, but to engage in philosophical debate you need to accept that logic may take you down some paths that you don't like, and then you must either accept the conclusions or change your assumptions and argument.

All those of you who think this is a worthy debate.... what would your take be if other mumsnetters were questioning whether YOUR children had a 'moral right to life'?

Why do YOUR children have more of a 'moral right to life' than those on the SN boards? Why are they more worthy?

As far as termination goes I'm pro choice but with the post 24 week rule generally for 'incompatible with life' cases. Once that baby is born then that is it, it is a child, a human being with life.

You do realise that what you are debating here is killing the children of some posters here?