Saturday, March 3, 2012

May God Have Mercy On Us

My sister-in-law passed along this piece recently published online in the Journal of Medical Ethics.  That's right, the Journal of Medical Ethics.  Consider just the title and abstract.  Read on if you have the stomach for it:

After-birth abortion: why should the baby live? 
Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus' health. 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 and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue 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.
The rest of the paper is equally clinical and matter-of-fact, maybe even more so.

I don't know about you, but the phrase "the banality of evil" come to mind.

1 comment:

  1. That polymath Peter Drucker once observed that putting an adjective in front of "ethics" was a way to justify a person not doing his ethical duty--e.g., legal ethics. This is what medical ethics has become.

    ReplyDelete