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Another Wave of Death from Pandora’s Box

Bradley Mattes   |   June 13, 2012

During 1973, the US Supreme Court opened the flood gates—or perhaps I should say blood gates—of abortion for any reason throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy. The later development of Partial-Birth abortion further obscured the line between life and death by making it possible to kill a baby during delivery. This expanded the window of opportunity to kill.

Now some are openly advocating killing newborn babies who manage an end-run around the abortion chamber. Two individuals affiliated with Australian universities, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, both PhDs, unveiled an appalling agenda to expand the window of death even further. They gained prestige and notoriety after being published in, of all things, the Journal of Medical Ethics.

Their article is entitled After-birth abortion: why should the baby live? I’m not sure which is more shocking—what they’re advocating or how boldly and crassly they advocate it. The authors actually coined the phrase “after-birth abortion (killing a newborn).” They don’t use the term euthanasia because they readily admit that the killing is not always serving the best interests of the victim, something they claim is always the case with euthanasia.
Giubilini and Minerva say that having a baby can be “an unbearable burden” because it might cause stress, economic or otherwise, for the mother or her family. What opens the door for this latest attack on innocent human life? Abortion. And I quote the words of these two advocates, “We claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be.” Once society declares open season on human life like they did in 1973, there’s no containing its lethal spread.

At the core of their reasoning is the tragically warped notion that newborns aren’t “actual people.” They’re “merely potential persons” because they aren’t cognitively aware of what they’d be missing had they been allowed to live. The authors wrote, “Merely being human is not in itself a reason for ascribing someone a right to life.” Chilling isn’t it? But in fairness to them, they cite prime examples already accepted by society: embryonic stem cell research and abortion. We could also add physician-assisted suicide. Of course this doesn’t justify the killing, but it bolsters their case with the PhD crowd.

Further, these “ethicists” give no time frame at which a born person gains this awareness and deserves to live. It’s an open-ended death sentence that would be carried out at whim by the parents and physician.

Do you think adoption is a less violent and deadly alternative to killing newborns? Not so fast. The emotional pain, they argue, of abortion and adoption is just as traumatic as the anguish of killing your newborn. And besides, they’re not actual people yet.

Just for the record, Giubilini and Minerva didn’t invent the idea of killing newborn babies. The Netherlands legalized euthanasia for infants in 2002 which accounts for 60 percent of all deaths of newborns in the country each year.

Peter Singer, Professor of Bio-Ethics at Princeton University (the hypocrisy is glaring) once wrote, “Human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time. They are not persons.” As a result, “the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog or a chimpanzee.”

It’s frightening to also realize that the after-birth abortion article was peer reviewed and deemed worthy of publication and serious discussion. The wolf is closer to America’s nurseries that you might expect.

Americans have in the past ignored people like Mr. Singer, Giubilini and Minerva as the rants of lonely voices. Thankfully, the after-birth abortion article has generated a firestorm of debate. It’s frightening though to read the comments of those who defend them, saying civilization can’t give in to moral absolutes.

Tell that to the millions of Jews and other unfortunate segments of society deemed less than human by Adolph Hitler and his Nazi thugs. Tell that to the generations of Blacks who suffered enslavement, beatings and death because slave owners considered them subhuman. The blood continues to cry out on behalf of tens of millions of unborn babies also brutally killed.

No, we must take this most recent threat to innocent human life very seriously. We must also take a firm and convincing stand against such violent and barbaric philosophies. A moral absolute is exactly what this world needs. Anything less will unleash another wave of death from Pandora’s Box.

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