"After-birth abortion"

[artsim]

http://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2012/02...1.abstract

[lucrezaborgia]

Quote:By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant

Trying to stir the pot? I don't feel like digging it out now but I can and will pull up the entire paper sometime tomorrow through my school library. In the meantime, I'm calling bullshit based off of this sentence from the abstract. A newborn isn't a potential person. It's a person and has almost all the legal rights that other people have. We can argue all day whether or not a fetus should be aborted or not and I don't really feel like going there right now...but a birthed child is no longer a fetus because it's not requiring the uterus for survival. Then again, we all know that women just love to abort babies in the third trimester instead of the first when it's mostly a blob with a tail. /sarcasm

On the flip-side, parents do have the right to impose DNR orders. Through a friend I know of a woman who gave birth to a baby with lissencephaly and decided against any care other than palliative. Her baby died 3 days after birth.

[Darrell]

Quote:A newborn isn't a potential person. It's a person and has almost all the legal rights that other people have.

Yes, that is how our law currently reads. But I have heard bio-ethicists argue that a baby does not become a person until it brings value to a community.

You say that the baby no longer needs a "uterus for survival" but it still does need _someone_ to help it survive. It can't make it on its own for several years. Apparently that is a signal to some people that we should still get to decide whether or not we want to be burdened and should be able to choose to terminate it if it's not convenient.

[Shoes]

Darrell Wrote:But I have heard bio-ethicists argue that a baby does not become a person until it brings value to a community

the baby ... still does need _someone_ to help it survive. It can't make it on its own for several years. Apparently that is a signal to some people that we should still get to decide whether or not we want to be burdened and should be able to choose to terminate it if it's not convenient.

With this rational, my parents could have decided to aborted me when i was 25.

[Darrell]

Quote:With this rational, my parents could have decided to aborted me when i was 25.

heh.

[artsim]

This paper just shows that there are at least some people who have such a low view of life that there are thresholds for personhood that are lower than what a lot of people would like. It shows that scientists and bioethicist don't always agree on when a child is a "person". It means that even science cannot give you a specific date when the fetus becomes a person because sometimes a premature baby will survive and sometimes not and so viability cannot be a determining factor because it is variable. It means a lot of baby/persons are probably killed.

[Persnickety Polecat]

I wonder who gets to decide who is most likely to benefit society. Do I? I pay taxes ... is that sufficient reason for me to be alive? I don't make any great contributions, after all. I write ad copy encouraging people to have vaginoplasties and boob jobs (shudder). I write ad copy for DUI attorneys (double shudder). God knows neither is advancing the human race any. Maybe someone needs to post-birth abort me.

[lucrezaborgia]

(02-28-2012 08:54 AM)artsim Wrote:  This paper just shows that there are at least some people who have such a low view of life that there are thresholds for personhood that are lower than what a lot of people would like.

Arguments in ethics aside, I doubt that most people would think it's OK to actively kill a person outside of capital punishment. DNR orders are passive ways of killing and they are legal in the US. My friend who had her baby die after being born at 24 weeks ended up turning the breathing machines off herself when told it was unlikely he would wake up from a coma.

Quote:It shows that scientists and bioethicist don't always agree on when a child is a "person".

They don't agree on a lot of things. Welcome to science!

Quote:It means that even science cannot give you a specific date when the fetus becomes a person because sometimes a premature baby will survive and sometimes not and so viability cannot be a determining factor because it is variable. It means a lot of baby/persons are probably killed.

How about when it's not, for all intents and purposes, a parasite? Depending on how premature, that survival is bought with a shitload of technology and the outcome isn't always the shiny happy one that you see in the media.

Darrell Wrote:You say that the baby no longer needs a "uterus for survival" but it still does need _someone_ to help it survive. It can't make it on its own for several years.

Except if the parents don't want to take care of the child they can hand it off to someone else. You cannot do that to a fetus.

Quote: Apparently that is a signal to some people that we should still get to decide whether or not we want to be burdened and should be able to choose to terminate it if it's not convenient.

The reasons women choose abortion are so varied that I don't think you can boil it down to convenience. Personally I think anything past the point of viability is wrong but I can think of reasons for exceptions.

On to the article!

Quote:In spite of the oxymoron in the expression, we propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion’, rather than ‘infanticide’, to emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus (on which ‘abortions’ in the traditional sense are performed) rather than to that of a child. Therefore, we claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be.

Like it or not, abortion is a very specific medical term. Infanticide is a very specific legal term. I'm not so sure it's a good idea to conflate these two, even in a philosophical paper. Besides, someone already discussed the benefits of infanticide about 200 years ago. A better term would be euthanasia.

Quote:Accordingly, a second terminological specification is that we call such a practice ‘after-birth abortion’ rather than ‘euthanasia’ because the best interest of the one who dies is not necessarily the primary criterion for the choice, contrary to what happens in the case of euthanasia.

...which they say no to because wha? Lexicographically, euthanasia isn't about whose best interest is involved. It means to kill painlessly.

Quote:The reason is that, unlike the case of death of an existing person, failing to bring a new person into existence does not prevent anyone from accomplishing any of her future aims.

Why the italics???

This isn't a very good paper overall. From people who write better than I as to why it sucks:

http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=5304 <---- not perfect but eh