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When I first read about this story, it made me sick at my stomach. While it justifies and vindicates everything that we conservatives have been saying about the pro-abortion left for some time, it doesn’t make you feel any better to read it.
The story comes from the Journal of Medical Ethics (just gnaw on that title for a while) and is called, “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?” And while I’ve commented before about the tragic and radical nature of this kind of dehumanizing thinking that the left has played with for years, Chuck Colson’s recent BreakPoint commentary on the subject struck a cord with me that I think needs to be expounded upon.
Here’s what Colson wrote:
"We claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be," write Drs. Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva.
How do they justify this conclusion? By agreeing with what Christians have been saying all along: that a newborn is no different from a baby in the womb. But instead of accepting that both have a God-given right to life because they're human, these ethicists argue that it ought to be legal for parents to kill either at their discretion.
If reasons like cost, stress, and inconvenience are good enough to justify an abortion, say Giubilini and Minerva, then they're good enough to justify infanticide, or as these ethicists call it with a straight face, "the killing of [a] potential person."
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And that’s the question. That’s the question that should be posed to every Democrat, every liberal, every supposedly “pro-choice” (what a meaningless euphemism that is) individual: what makes the justifications for abortion unacceptable as justifications for infanticide? If you can kill a baby one second before it’s delivered because it will be a financial burden, why can’t you kill a baby one second after delivery for the same reason? Or better yet, why not one hour after delivery? Or one day? What is it that makes a person a person?
That’s always the argument we hear nowadays. It used to be, before science and technology proved otherwise, that the unborn baby was just a blob of tissue and not even recognizable as a human. Now that argument doesn’t work, and science clearly demonstrates the humanity of what is in the womb. So these advocates of child sacrifice advance their terror by suggesting that even if it is a human, it isn’t a person. This is clearly not a scientific position, but a philosophical (kinda funny since the left always claims to be the paragons of scientific fidelity, huh?). But if we’re going to engage this nonsense, the foremost question must be: when is it a person? There is nothing magical that happens at the point of birth – the baby is no more “viable” to live on its own then, it isn’t any more “self-aware” or “self-reliant” then. Indeed, one year olds aren’t either. And given that these are the arguments the left cites to explain why the baby in the womb doesn’t count as a person, and therefore can be scalded to death with saline, perhaps it’s time we demand some better explanations.
What they are advocating, whether they realize it or not, is not some higher, more enlightened philosophy. They are advancing the same barbaric bloodlust that the ancient pre-Christian world advanced as they worshipped their own indulgences. As we slip towards a post-Christian America, it should be no surprise we’re seeing a resurgence of that unenlightened ignorance from the left.
