Monsters Among Us... Ethicists Advocate For After-Birth Abortions

I just read a blog post by Gene Edward Veith about a new report in the Journal for Medical Ethics titled, "After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?"


I had a difficult time believing what I was reading from Veith, so I spent some time reading the Medical Ethics Paper.  In all seriousness I could barely read the whole article.  I actually found myself questioning if these Ethicists were using sarcasm/irony in this paper.  However, they are not.  Listen to the conclusion statement of their paper:

"If criteria such as the costs (social, psychological, economic) for the potential parents are good enough reasons for having an abortion even when the fetus is healthy, if the moral status of the newborn is the same as that of the infant and if neither has any moral value by virtue of being a potential person, then the same reasons which justify abortion should also justify the killing of the potential person when it is at the stage of a newborn."

 Three responses:

1. The corruption of our sinful nature manifests itself in so many ways.  The way that our depravity affects the way we view and value life is that we end up judging life’s value based on criteria we think is important. Sin turns the source of value from the Creator to the creature.  We creatures have not done well in the criteria we have used to determine life’s value. We have used ethnicity as a basis for value and ended up with places like Auschwitz and Cambodia and Croatia and Rwanda—hundreds of thousands brutally slaughtered. We have used skin color as a basis for value and ended up with slave trading and civil war and discrimination and lynching—thousands upon thousands of lives lost.  More and more we use health as a basis for value and end up with assisted suicide and euthanasia and “killing as a means of caring” and the elderly being led to believe they have the “duty to die.” Millions of people with disabilities and people in nursing homes are increasingly at risk of hastened deaths. Now we use criteria such as costs for the potential parents and that newborns are not capable of contributing to their existence as a basis for value, thus we end up with abortion being the most common surgical procedure done is this country. Millions upon millions of lives lost.  (Taken From Sermon Titled: Hands That Knit: Arms That Hold)
2. In the words of Gene Edward Veith, "Will this be the next pro-life battle, trying to stop the murder of infants?"
3. Truly We Have Monsters Among Us...

HT: Gene Edward Veith