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

I often wonder if the people who shout about their right to debate this actually have ever been in the position where it could have been their child that was murdered?
it is all very well "debating" and giggling, making sly digs and being down right offensive if you are not affected.
most of the people who are so angry about this thread are people whose babies would have been murdered, do the debaters enjoy hurting and causing distress? does their right to debate out weigh the rights of others?

The right to debate does outweigh the right of individuals not to have their feelings hurt. It's not all about you.

Having being involved in the disabled world for many years Synyster I am afraid you are right. I hang my head and weep.

No its not about us it is about our children If you do not want them there are plenty who would!!

solidgoldbrass of course it isn't.
but why is all about you?
why is your right to debate more important that the hurt it causes?
you seem to spend a lot of time being as offensive as possible to anyone who disagree's with you, why?
there are 2 sides to any debate, you have to accept the hurt caused to the other side on this debate.
(I use debate loosely)

Could you try to remember the very distinct and important point that this argument is specifically anti-disabilist? A huge part of the argument is that there should be no logical distinction between a disabled foetus and a non-disabled, or newborn?
Why are you turning it into another disabled rights fight when it isn't?

Solid is right as well, when you stifle debate on the grounds that it might upset people, we might as well all have a lobotomy now. Especially when using specious emotive arguments to shout down intellectual debate.

Like this: "I often wonder if the people who shout about their right to debate this actually have ever been in the position where it could have been their child that was murdered?"
Who, anywhere, is arguing for murder of any children? Against the wishes of the parents? Thats extreme hyperbole that helps nothing.

Abortion and killing fully developed new born babies are I think are two entirely different things.

The whole argument for allowing the killing of newborn babies rests on whether we think they are human based on the criteria put forward by these academics. The criteria they used wasn't based on any known medical/scientific understanding of what constitutes a human being.

When I said that I felt women should decide within a rational and clear framework I think that needs to be based on what we know about development within the womb.

The academics said that women could allow their newborn to die if they couldn't afford to look after the child because their circs had changed. Shouldn't we be supporting women to be able to afford to keep their children before we start advocating killing babies. Apart from that though what does this say about women who choose to keep their babies but they are single mothers who may need more help from the state, do we over step the line and suggest they might consider "killing " their baby. Is that not discriminatory towards women lower down the economic scale.

Lastly what about women giving children up for adoption, the academics said this effected women very badly. So now we put the women's rights not to feel guilt above human life. Except she will probably have to live with the guilt of killing a baby, surely that's worse. I know women who feel guilty for having had an abortion at 8 weeks, so just imagine how a women might feel to have to give birth and then give consent to let the child be "put down"

Before we trumpet women's rights above all else we might like to reflect upon the fact that many babies are female. What about the uproar when we hear about Indian families killing baby girls, or the chinese, or rich women choosing the sex of their baby.

"The whole argument for allowing the killing of newborn babies rests on whether we think they are human based on the criteria put forward by these academics."

No. Personhood, not humanity. We know they are human, the question argued was whether they have achieved personhood.

And seriously, do any of you think for one moment anyone is actually saying, on a practical level, lets kill babies? And that even if they were, people are reading the morning paper and thinking "Hmm, now that is an excellent idea..."
Come on!

Peppy - Do any of the people discussing this have disabilities? Ever heard of "Nothing about us, without us"?

I am alllll for ethical debate, but a bunch of people pulling the intellectually superior debating card with out any awareness of what ableism really is or the theories around it is disturbing.

Mini - That's why reproductive rights needs to go beyond having the access to abortion, hence the need for reproductive justice: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproductive_justice It's wiki but a good overview.

I have no idea. I don't tend to find out peoples ability levels before valuing their opinion.

This sort of debate isn't about whether we kill our children. It is about us, our own right to life and what it is to be human. At least to me.

When I debate abortion and whose "rights" triumph I'm not personally considering disability. I think about my mother who had two children she did not plan, both of whom are physically healthy and NT, in less than ideal circumstances, and whose life seems to have been sacrificed for us. I debate this and come down on the pro-choice-for-any-reason-until-term side of the abortion debate because I really do think that my mother's right to attempt to make life better for herself should have trumped my right to an existence before I was even aware of that existence. And I do so in large part because I feel guilty about what she sacrificed.

I engage in and contemplate these sorts of debates because it is useful for me to think carefully about where that line is, not because I'm thinking about the worth of people with disabilities but because I am thinking about the worth of myself. I can see value in considering how my belief in the right to attempt a better life might impact people with disabilities as a whole because of the ableism that exists within our society - but that would require people to engage in the debate with insight into that aspect rather than try to shut down all debate wholesale.

SuchProspects, that is such a great post.

SuchProspects, we have the right to give our child to the care of the State if we are overwhelmed by the responsibility and demand of parenting. Surely that is more than adequate. Why do we 'normalise' the practice of conceiving a child then changing our minds and terminating the life of another human being?

We wouldn't advocate that if a marriage turns out to be unworkable that one partner can kill the other, would we? We instead have laws that allow for 'divorce' - the legal separation of the legally joined couple.

Adoption is the divorce of parents from their children (either willingly or unwillingly. Or perhaps that should be either consensually or non-consensually, as there will be many cases where a parent accepts that the decision is the appropriate course of action but desperately wishes it were different).

Why do we allow people to go that step further, skipping 'divorce' and instead opting for destruction?

To me, at least in relation to this aspect of the debate (and there are others), it is because what we destroy isn't a "person" in the same way as the mother is at the time. My mother could have given us up for adoption but that would still have had a very negative impact on her life, a life that she was already aware of, that she had already invested her own energy in. Whereas abortion - well I wouldn't have lost what I consider to be my life because I didn't have anything of life as I see it.

When I talk about life here I'm not meaning physical existence, and where I become a separate entity from my mother (another aspect of the abortion debate), I'm meaning the personhood idea - what makes us uniquely deserving of protection over other animals or life forms.

That last post is in response to Lougle.

You see, Lougle, that is precisely the point. You believe that meaningful life - personhood - begins at conception. And therefore that adoption is less cruel than abortion.

I do not believe that personhood begins at conception. I think bearing a child to term and then giving them up for adoption is, in most cases, more cruel than having an abortion. Because the former is visiting actual harm on a real person, and the latter is simply removing possibility from a potential person. But obviously if I thought, like you, that personhood starts at conception then I would not hold this view.

And that is why exploring what personhood is and when it starts is important. Very often, when debating abortion, I've been asked why I think it is not ok to kill a newborn baby, but ok to kill a baby just days/weeks/months before. It is a very valid challenge, and forces me to really think beyond what is convenient for women and consider the ethical factors involved.

I honestly see this article as being just another way, an other-way-round way, of asking why most people consider a baby a person and a fetus a non-person.

You can't compare a fully grown adult person with a foetus. If you want to compare that properly, imagine your husband is attached to you via wires and tubes dependent on you for every aspect of his survival, taking nutrients from you, and would die if you unplugged him. And no-one asked you if you wanted to be hooked up to him.
Now, you want to divorce him. Should you be forced to stay hooked up to him until such time as he can get by on his own? And have to go through dangerous procedures that could kill you, and a very painful operation to let him go, and then serious emotional and legal upheaval, knowing that he could come back and claim a relationship with you at any time? Or should you be able to unhook yourself and say, no thanks, I don't want to be your life support machine?

Only then have you got a fair comparison.

Legally a foetus does not have the rights of a born person. The article yesterday intimates that killing a day old baby is no different to having an abortion, which of course is legal nonsense since the day old baby has legal rights that the foetus does not.

In terms of the moral debate contained within that statement, the question really is (probably from the anti-abortion camp) that foetuses should have the same rights as a born baby or a child or adult. The issue to me is a lot more grey.

In my view, a non-viable foetus (ie one that has not yet reached a stage of gestation where it is capable of independent living) cannot possibly have the same "rights" as a viable foetus as it depends entirely on the mother and her body to survive and to make its rights trump the mothers' would mean treating the mother as a mere vessel and not as a human being in her right.

The problem with this debate is that is so polarised, in terms of the opinions, the language and imagery used, the ethical standpoints, that it is pretty much impossible to reach a consensus. Our current legislation is as close to consensual as I think it's possible to get, although I do believe that the laws permitting the abortion up to term of disabled babies should be tightened up so that they cannot be used as loopholes in the case of non-fatal conditions in the foetus.

I would also add that despite being broadly in the "right to choose" camp, my personal feelings regarding the murders of heavily pregnant women there have been - that poor woman blown up in Omagh when 8.5 months pregnant with twins, that murdered girl who was 7.5 months pregnant, is that the babies were also murdered. I believe that the bloke who killed that poor girl should have been also convicted of the murder of the baby, and that more mention should have been made of the death of the babies along with the other victims. I believe that the Omagh twins are mentioned on the memorial, but then Ireland is a largely Catholic country.

Omagh is in the UK, not Ireland.

The problem with legislating for murder of the unborn is serious implications on abortion law. We can't go backwards on that.

I know, I know. I just think that the dead babies might be a little more acknowledged that they seem to be in the media etc.

Ethics doesn't count in legalities, logic or societial norms. Ethics serves a seperate purpose.

There is a difference between ethical debate and just debate.

This isn't something that is being proposed, but with advances in medicine and human rights, these subjects have to be debated. Some of the findings do go on to shape policy, but normally in a positive way.