After-birth Abortion: Journal Defends Decision to Publish Paper Advocating Killing Healthy Newborns

Should mothers, parents, families, and society have the option the kill healthy newborn babies? Newborns which could have been adopted, the adoption causing more ‘grief’ to the mother than killing the newborn? These two arguments are from a paper published by the Journal of Medical Ethics blog who found themselves having to defend what some believe is indefensible: the killing of newborn babies dubbed After-birth Abortions.

Journal of Medical Ethics Blog post, “Liberals Are Disgusting”: In Defence of the Publication of “After-Birth Abortion”:

[Snip]

“The Journal of Medical Ethics prepublished electronically an article by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva entitled “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?”

This article has elicited personally abusive correspondence to the authors, threatening their lives and personal safety. The Journal has received a string abusive emails for its decision to publish this article. This abuse is typically anonymous.”

After cherry picking choice derogatory anonymous comments from across the web, the editor, Julian Savulescu, defended the decision to publish the paper by way of informing the public the arguments proposed by Giubilini and Minerva “are largely not new and have been presented repeatedly in the academic literature and public fora by the most eminent philosophers and bioethicists in the world, including Peter Singer, Michael Tooley and John Harris in defence of infanticide, which the authors call after-birth abortion”.

And,

“Many people will and have disagreed with these arguments. However, the goal of the Journal of Medical Ethics is not to present the Truth or promote some one moral view. It is to present well reasoned argument based on widely accepted premises. The authors provocatively argue that there is no moral difference between a fetus and a newborn. Their capacities are relevantly similar. If abortion is permissible, infanticide should be permissible. The authors proceed logically from premises which many people accept to a conclusion that many of those people would reject.

And,

“What the response to this article reveals, through the microscope of the web, is the deep disorder of the modern world. Not that people would give arguments in favour of infanticide, but the deep opposition that exists now to liberal values and fanatical opposition to any kind of reasoned engagement.”

From the comment section:

While logic is certainly laudable, and academic freedom is certainly necessary, you cannot hide behind them when your publications evoke a justified ire.
There is no deep disorder in the world, Madame Savulescu. There is a deep disorder in academia that causes its participants and advocates to dismiss the disbelief of humanity at large.
Academia is no longer a bastion of intelligence, nor is it a wellspring of knowledge. It is a clique of self-admiring, self-aggrandizing, self-proclaimed “intellectuals” that ignore the basic tenets of humanity at will, and contemn any who dare to criticize them with anything but the academically approved language and form that they (the intellectuals) propose.

I’m quite certain that you’ve been offended that some, not as liberal or educated as yourself, have dared to attack this article and, by extension or implication, your journal. However, if, as an academic, you were to withdraw from the microcosm of academia, you would realize that such reactions are not uncommon, even among liberals. When presented with something so outrageous, so sickening, so incredibly disturbing, strong emotions come to the forefront, and often they spill right out without any further thought.

While I don’t intend to imply that the responses you’ve listed are logical or acceptable, I do intend to ignore all the subsequent frivolity you’ve written. Your journal published an extremely offensive—even if well-reasoned—article. You attacked the deepest held beliefs of the majority of humanity. You allowed an article to be published that advocates dispassionate violence against the most helpless of all human beings.
Yet, somehow, all you’re worried about is the “deep opposition” … “to liberal values and fanatical opposition to” … “reasoned engagement.”

But I’ve said enough. Don’t let me waste your time any longer. Please, Madame, pour another round for your ivory tower colleagues, and go back to the back-patting, the patronization of humanity at large, the narcissism with which you justify your every action, and ignore us, the fanatics that dare to believe that there are lines that should not be crossed, even in the name of academic freedom.”

…

“You can dispassionately discuss a formalized method for killing full-term babies yet are troubled by heated rhetoric that arises from your discussion of same. And you provide samples of verbal abuse as if they prove some sort of moral equivalence. Monsters.”

…

It is both disturbing and regrettable that the “choice” being proposed in this article has chilling similarities to the Nazi process of ‘selection.’

Do these authors even know where the concept they use “lives…not worth living” came from?

Do these authors know that they are following in the footsteps of two once distinguished but now infamous German academics: the jurist Karl Binding of the University of Leipzig, and Alfred Hoche, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Freiburg?

Way back in 1920, Hoche and Binding argued that “…the principle of ‘allowable killing’ should be extended to the incurably sick… The right to live must be earned and justified…Theirs is not a life worth living; hence their destruction is not only tolerable but humane.” The crucial work — “The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life” (Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens) included as “unworthy life” not only the incurably ill but large segments of the mentally ill, the feebleminded, and “retarded and deformed” children. More than that, the authors professionalized and medicalized the entire concept. And they stressed the therapeutic goal [i.e. the intention] of that concept: destroying life unworthy of life is “purely a healing treatment” and a “healing work.” (Robert Jay Lifton:”The Nazi doctors: medical killing and the psychology of genocide”p.46 (1986)

The Nazi directors of the German abortion and euthanasia programmes embraced the concept of ‘life unworthy of life’ (See the policy speech by Gerhard Wagner (head of the Nazi physicians association): “Rasse und
Bevölkerungspolitik,” Der Parteitag der Ehre, vom 8, bis 14, September 1936. Offizieller Bericht über den Verlauf des Reichsparteitages mit sämtlichen Kongreßreden, Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP., 1936, pp.150-60).

The authors of this current article appear to be ignorant also of the fact that the term “after-birth abortions” is not original either: it was already in use by Hitler’s physicians:

“Making widespread use of the Darwinian term ‘selection’, the Nazis sought to take over the functions of nature (natural selection)… in orchestrating their own ‘selections’, their own version of human evolution…Newborn infants with Down syndrome were identified at birth and placed on a register for lethal medical treatment after a perfunctory examination by a board of ‘specialist’ doctors: the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses (Reichsausschuss zur wissenschaftlichen Erfassung erb- und anlagebedingter schwerer Leiden), headed by Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician. On August 18, 1939, the committee issued a decree that required reporting of all newborns and infants under the age of three with suspected “serious hereditary diseases.” These “diseases” included Down’s syndrome, deformities, paralysis, deafness, blindness, and others. While physicians had been unofficially killing babies “unfit to live” since at least 1933, the
creation of this committee officially authorized such killings. Dr. Karl Brandt explained the aim: “The
objective was to obtain possession of these abortions and destroy them as soon as possible after they had been brought into the world.” (Henry Friedlander: The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995, PP.57-8)

“A questionnaire was prepared in which the attending physician provided a detailed history. The doctors also made predictions about the baby’s future quality of life. The questionnaires were then sent to a
committee of physicians who determined whether to give the child a mark of “+”, which recommended extermination.”
(Forgotten Crimes: The Holocaust and people with Disabilities. A Report by Disability Rights Advocates, California,
2001 pp. 13-14.)

Perhaps the only excuse for the atrocities being proposed by these authors today is that they are either too callow or too ignorant of the Nazi precedents to what they are advocating to resurrect in this current
Journal article.

We should not go down that path again.

Link to the New York Times article GERMAN DOCTORS AND THE FINAL SOLUTION published September 21, 1986.

Link to ‘Bioethicists’ and Obama agree: infanticide should be legal.

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