Killing Babies. WTF?

[4ForksSake]

Have had a check & can't see any previous posts on this but has anyone seen this article? What are these people on? Feel physically sick reading it.

www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9113394/Killing-babies-no-different-from-abortion-experts-say.html

Oh thought I was in Chat! Sorry.

I think there is a fairly lengthy thread in the In the news section on this article :)

The Daily Telegraph is well known for its anti abortion line. This is just a sensational story which they hope will spark off a debate so 'pro-lifers' have an excuse to spout their usual misogynistic crap.

The gist of the article is: two academics said something controversial which most people would regard as abhorrent nonsense. Academics 'say things' all the time - as they are entitled to. It does NOT mean anyone else will agree with them, or that our laws are likely to change, or anything else. Those two academics have NO POWER. It is a non-story designed to spark an argument.

Try here, it explains quite well how the Telegraph has misinterpreted and blown things out of proportion.

i read the first sentence of this over someones shoulder on the tube but got shuffled out of the way so didnt see the rest of the article. THey were reading The Times.

Think it's in most of the papers, just happened to see it in the telegraph, but think it's from an article in the BMJ.

Op, made me feel sick too. Hate these articles.

Someone sent me the link to that article yesterday...

Hopefully, people who hold such extreme views will never be involved in making or implementing policy decisions.

Commonsense should prevail...it's a nonsense to say that any child (whether born or unborn) is any less human or deserving of life than an adult.

Ive just read this in another tabloid and almost brought my lunch back up. Im thinking this is just a pair of sickos having a rant about stuff they will never be allowed to make any decisons on! Still truly horrifying though

The weird thing is...that they are supposed to be academically bright!

Yet they come up with such stupid and ridiculously bizarre notions!

They don't actually hold the view that babies should be killed.

It's a philosophical exercise.

They are saying that as the process of giving birth does not fundamentally change the nature of the foetus/baby, killing one should be equal, on moral ground, with killing the other.

sigh....

didn't you read the whole article properly?

*The authors therefore concluded that ?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?.

They also argued that parents should be able to have the baby killed if it turned out to be disabled without their knowing before birth, for example citing that ?only the 64 per cent of Down?s syndrome cases? in Europe are diagnosed by prenatal testing.

Once such children were born there was ?no choice for the parents but to keep the child?, they wrote.

?To bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care.?*

There's a really long thread already about this.

Like someone said, its a philosophical exercise exploring ethics. Typical piss poor reporting and people all too ready to have things to be outraged about.

The weird thing is...that they are supposed to be academically bright!

Having worked with 'Academics' they can be scarily smart but not have an oz. of common sense.

Have heard some of the most weird and wonderful things come out of their mouths and spent hours trying to explain why they couldn?t say do xyz.

I once worked with a medical researcher who wanted to routinely test all patients who were admitted with chest pain to be drug tested, without their knowledge and just to prove her theory.

I spent hours explaining why you couldn?t do tests on patients without their consent, her answer well don?t ask them ! Really couldn?t get through to her that the individuals rights were more important that her ?want? to know.

Her argument was the improving medical knowledge was more important ?The needs of the many being greater than the needs of the few. . ?

Most Academics are the type of people who will press the big red button that says DO NOT PRESS just to see what happens.

Very interesting point smells

It's actually not some new discussion - Praxis by Fay Weldon deals with this issue, and was published in 1993.

bit of a stereotypical sweeping generalisation re academics.

The whole point of debating philosophy and ethics is that you do so in an abstract manner, paying attention only to the logic and not to so-called "common sense".

trills you mentioned that the subject was being discussed elsewhere....so why are you commenting here?

Am I not allowed to discuss the same issue with more than one group of people?

Oh right...so you weren't trying to dictate where we should post...just mentioning by the by that there was another thread at another post....and that it was very long...

WTF sausages? why are you asking someone why they are posting on a thread? Erm, could it because they want to? Why the outrage?

I don't agree with the paper as such, being inclined to make more of a distinction than the authors do between a three month foetus/embryo and a nine-month one or a newborn. Nonetheless, it's unfair to paint the people concerned as bloodthirsty monsters, and unhelpful to have histrionics over possible effect on government policy. Firstly, I teach moral philosophy to undergrads, so I have some insight into what is going on here - for example, I don't try to convince my students that it is right to hang an innocent person/kill someone for their organs/insert similar examples ad nauseum, but I do use those examples to encourage them to get over their conditioned 'yuck' reflex when thinking through moral problems. Most of us would be just as horrified as the next person if such things were actually enshrined in the law. However, we do feel it necessary to open up the debate. Personally as controversial papers go I was more horrified by one I saw that suggested experimenting on prisoners, but nonetheless I would rather the idea was out in the open to be challenged and rejected on proper grounds rather than because people are grossed out. Secondly, the ethicists in question are with philosophy departments, not with a medical school or the government, so they are about as likely to affect what actually happens in a maternity ward as the people who devised the trolley problem are to influence the day-to-day running of the London Underground.

it's a philisophical debate - she is not actually suggesting we all go out and kill babies !