StemCell Therapy

COMMENTARY | The ever-heated abortion debate brings out the beast in both sides. Occasionally, key quotes from one side may actually advance the cause of the other, as the latest controversy suggests. Maybe this one just makes the issues more obvious.

Headlines exploded after two ethicists published "After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?" in the Journal of Medical Ethics (JME), a British medical journal February 23.

The authors, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, essentially said no ethical difference exists between a fetus and a newborn. Either both are real humans or neither are. Following this logic, abortion and infanticide would be considered equal.

"Merely being human is not in itself a reason for ascribing someone a right to life," the article read. "Many humans are not considered subjects of a right to life: spare embryos where research on embryo stem cells is permitted, fetuses where abortion is permitted, criminals where capital punishment is legal."

Pro-lifers jumped on the idea, as The Sun reported. Giubilini and Minerva never indicated an age at which child-killing would be considered immoral. Could babies be offed at a month, six months, a year or more?

Would infanticide, relabeled after-birth abortion, lead to even more legal killings? "This slope has far more room left down which we could slide," Catholic Moral Theology writer Charles Camosy concluded.

Journal editor Julian Savulescu told The Telegraph the ethicist pair had received death threats. The two posted a somewhat side-straddling response in the JME blog on March 2. "We had no idea that our paper would raise such a heated debate," they wrote. "It was meant to be a pure exercise of logic: if X, then Y."

Could the two have played a devil's advocate, either inadvertently or intentionally, reigniting the age-old debate on when personhood begins?

"The Catholic Church has been making the same logical connections between abortion and infanticide for ... 2000 years," Camosy claimed in a post for Oxford University's Practical Ethics.

Giubilini and Minerva may have added ammunition to the pro-life camp by suggesting equality between the newly born and the unborn. Killing is either wrong or right. If life matters after birth, perhaps the ethical and medical communities will reexamine pre-birth existence.

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After-Birth Abortion Claim Points Instead to Pre-Birth Humanity

This entry was posted on March 3, 2012 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Legal Issues Stem Cells. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |