Two medical ethicists have controversially claimed that doctors should be allowed to kill disabled or even unwanted newborn babies because they are “not actual persons”.

In an article published by the British Medical Journal, Francesca Minerva and Alberto Guibilini argue that parents should be given the choice to end the lives of their children shortly after they are born because, at this stage, they are “morally irrelevant” and have “no moral right to life.”

In the article,entitled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live”, they argue that infanticide is no different morally to abortion since both a foetus and a newborn baby were only “potential persons”.

“The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a foetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual,” the authors claimed.

“Both a foetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a person in the sense of subject of a moral right to life.”

The authors suggested that the practice of infanticide, which they termed as “after- birth abortion” should even be permissible where a child was perfectly healthy if the birth was unwanted, inconvenient or too expensive for the parents.

They concluded that: “What we call ‘after-birth abortion’ should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the new-born is not disabled”.

Criticism

Academic peers, however, have criticised the article for being “chilling” and an “inhumane defence of child destruction”.

For more see article published 02/03/2012:

http://www.christianconcern.com/our-concerns/medics-suggest-legalising-infanticide [Read more…]