As it turns out, that’s what Dr. Francesca Minerva claims she was doing when she and Alberto Giubilini wrote an article about “after birth abortion” in the Journal of Medical Ethics. I read the following from an article by Dave Andrusko: We were just funning around, Dr. Francesca Minerva told the Sydney Morning Herald, when she and a colleague wrote that “We claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be. I didn’t mean to change any laws. I’m not in favor of infanticide. I’m just using logical arguments.”
According to the logical argument by Minerva and Giubilini a fetus nor a new born are considered a person because they have not established a “self or future.” They wrote: “We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her. It might start having expectations and develop a minimum level of self-awareness at a very early stage, but not in the first days or few weeks after birth.” In other words, if you are dependent on someone/something to survive, you are not worthy of personhood. That leaves me in a pickle, as I’m sure it does a lot of Americans. I’m dependent on certain drugs to fight ailments I have. Left on my own, my life would most probably be cut short. Heart patients are not only dependent on drugs, but also various objects implanted by a physician. Without these modern devices, one might die. The list of what could suddenly turn a human being into a non-person is endless. Should everyone not capable of living without assistance of some kind be terminated?
So far, I fail to see anything “funny” about their opinion. They basically say if a mother wants to make the decision to terminate her baby after birth has occurred, she has that right. The reasons that might be used are a problem during birth, losing a partner and not wanting the stress of raising a child alone, adoption might cause the mother to suffer psychological distress from giving her child up, and last, but not least, the child might be deformed or disabled. Just kidding, huh? In 1939 Hitler received a letter from the parents of a severely deformed child born near Leipzig, seeking his permission for their child to be put to death. I suppose he was just kidding when he approved killing this child. Soon, the parent/ guardians permission was taken out of the equation and all children under three with diseases and disabilities were put to death. I think you know the rest of this story. What Hitler did was a real knee slapper. Was he trying to be funny? I don’t think so.
