Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Killing Babies


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 journal’s editor, Prof Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, said the article's authors had received death threats since publishing the article. He said those who made abusive and threatening posts about the study were “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society”.

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.”

Read the article here.


Julian Savulescu has been consistently ghoulish. Savulescu, an Australian, also believes that parents are morally obliged to genetically engineer their children so that they will have higher IQs. "There are other ethical principles which should govern reproduction, such as the public interest," he said. This policy would reduce welfare dependency, crowding in jails, school dropout rates and poverty. "Cheaper, efficient whole genome analysis makes it a real possibility in the near future."

Eugenics did not die with the Nazi regime. Eugenics has clawed its way out of the grave and is being rehabilitated by so-called ethicists like Savulescu.

He remains ignorant of the sophisticated ethics of archaic communities, against the background of which his ethics appear barbarian.

Related reading: Savulescu and Harris on Enhancing Morality;  Reduce Divorce With Love Drugs; Killing Babies in Ancient Greece and Rome



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