The Rise of Infanticide Consciousness
I have been warning that infanticide is being normalized among the intelligentsia and in medicine. This story from Australia is more evidence that this is true. Apparently one-third of Aussie doctors would kill babies born with severe disabilities. And here's an interesting twist that demonstrates that would be disabled baby killers do not come at this from an objective view: "The survey found that doctors who fear a slow and painful death are more likely to hasten the death of sick infants in their care."
In light of recent stories, such as the Swiss court permitting assisted suicide of the mentally ill, can anyone seriously believe that assisted suicide is really about "choice" when nothing else can be done to alleviate the suffering of competent, dying patients?
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 9:35 AM
23 Comments
23 Comments:
Would-be. Not would be. It's less confusing that way.
Now then.
People are very much afraid of death - that's a given, and we're supposed to be. It's what keeps us alive. To be afraid of a particular type of death - slow and painful - and then use that as a reason to kill a newborn, is to project yourself onto another person. That's a form of narcissism that's deadly. What I want has nothing to do with what's right for someone else. Especially not a baby who hasn't had a chance to experience anything.
Too cold. Far too cold.
With phrases like "infanticide", who would support this?
But still, I can't fully agree with your premise here and as written elsewhere. I don't see a moral difference between actively injecting a pain-killing drug that might hasten death v. withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment.
Legal difference? Sure. That's clear.
But a moral difference? No, because:
1. The principal itself I find faulty because taking the child abuse analogy, neglect and active abuse are both bad, and
2. in reality, the factual distinctions are often gray.
Withdraw of LST is often praised, even called dignity, but it is too close to its cousin, which is demonized.
I don't see it. At least morally, the distinction is false.
Pragmatically, there may be better justifications for this approach.
No, Royale. This is not about inadvertently hastening death through legitimate and aggressive application of pain control It is INTENDING to cause death. As in what happens in the Netherlands--lethal injections.
I checked that post, that was at issue.
But still, this is all one big red herring. There will be many, many gray areas in between the legitimate and praised LST withdraw and demonized euthanasia. But the result is the same - a child dies. Oftentimes, many of the children killed by the withdraw of LST will die for the 'convenience' - convenience of the parent, health care costs, or even actual compassion for the suffering child. And lo and behold, those very objections justify demonized euthanasia.
If we allow removal of LST, then we remove many of the very same moral objections to euthanasia.
Again, practical objections might be better, but morally, they are the equal.
The abortion intelligencia-the abortion academics- has been pro-infanticide for a LONG time, probably by the early 90's.
So I'm not surprised at all. It's been years in coming to this. The abortion movement came out against the Born Alive Infants Protection Act until Rep. Nadler of New York shut them up for PR purposes. Darn him!
Infanticide should make sense and logically flow to personhood theorists and to the culture of abortion. If you aren't a person or human with ultimate value until you come to a certain level of self-awareness, possess the ability to value your future for an instant, or because you don't meet some other criteria for personhood or ultimate value in the womb, what difference does birth make?
Birth doesn't change any of that. And after birth, you still can't survive on your own, you are still a burden, still unwanted, and you still might not be the kind of kid your parents want-just as much as you were before birth.
There’s no reason that those arguments used to dispose the unborn should be any less outrageous when used to dispose the newborn because the reasons/conditions justifying their disposal are no less true of the newborn as the unborn.
Infanticide flows from abortion arguments.
So I think it makes sense. I'm just surprised it is taking so long to express itself publicly.
I think think the flame will be fanned.
As the local representative of personhood theory, let me reply to don nelson.
There is no hard and fast boundary where personhood is achieved. It's not just a matter of cognitive capacity, it's a social construct -- a person is someone who has been accepted as such in the human community.
Birth is a convenient milestone but not an absolute one. Most traditional cultures do in fact practice infanticide -- there is a period after birth where the infant may be rejected and killed. Tough rules for tough circumstances.
That's not to say we should. But we do as a society have to define personhood somehow. I've argued here in the past that all of you are personhood theorists -- nobody treats every single fertilized egg as a human being. So we as a society have to decide how to decide on when an organism becomes a person. Which we are working on here.
Speaking of Steven Pinker, he wrote an essay on this a few years ago which I'm sure will piss people off. Also see this very thorough article on neonaticide.
Gregory,
Why single out the motivations of euthanasia but not LST withdraw?
I think in many cases of the latter, the family and doctors hope, intend, or know that the removal of LST will kill the person.
We can say removal of LST gives the decision to "God" or is "natural," but doctors know enough to accurately predict that a person will die if LST is removed. Thus, where death is certain and in fact, the person actually does die, I see no moral difference between that and injecting the person with cyanide. (take Schiavo for instance)
Saying it's "natural" or letting "God take care" of it is only a cop-out to make us feel better, when in both situations, we caused the death of the person.
Being that I am in favor of LST removal, I must therefore be in favor of active euthanasia, at least where there is no moral distinction between the two.
Since parents decide the medicine of their children in every other instance, I see no moral difference between parents deciding to remove LST and injecting pain-killers into a severely disabled newborn who cannot live without LST, knowing that the pain-killers will hasten death in the latter (i.e., what Wesley calls infanticide here).
Prove to me those who believe abortion should remain legal also believe in killing the disabled and infants.
Of course, there is no evidence, but, hey, it helps in demonizing those with whom you disagree.
I could just as well tag the anti-abortion crowd as being against women's rights, which in fact the vast majority of them are. They don't care about the so-called rights of the fetus but care deeply about preserving outdated traditional sex roles.
Gregory,
If death is certain and foreseeable, then I see no difference between pulling a plug and shooting in the head.
Raven,
Just lost my post when I went to preview. Will converse later.
Susan, I didn't say those who believe abortion should be legal believe infanticide should be legal. I said it was the abortion intelligencia-the academics. There's a huge difference. However it is a known fact that the abortion extablishment initially came out against the Born Alive Infants Protection Act until pro-abortion congressman Nadler of New York shut them up.
The abortion academics/intelligencia like Singer, Tooley and etc have long believed in infanticide. You can argue with them.
As I said, there’s no reason that those arguments used to dispose the unborn should be any less outrageous when used to dispose the newborn because the reasons/conditions justifying their disposal are no less true of the newborn as the unborn.
As to the charge of how we pro-lifers treat women and that we don't care for the unborn, you can argue with and tell that to the 3000 plus crisis pregnancy care centers and their many volunteers and millions of contributors, adoption agencies and etc that they don't care about the unborn and all they care about is making baby factories out of women and making sure they don't violate any traditional outdated roles and all the other ad hominem nonsense that gets spewed for lack of an argument. Don't make me laugh. Your ad hominem arguments are about all abortion supporters have left but even that is going to crumble, even in Reno Nevada.
There's a crisis care home on Mill Steet across from Renown Medical Center. And there's a pregnancy center on Brinkby. You can stop over there and tell them they don't care. Good luck.
mtraven:
Hi again... um.
" I've argued here in the past that all of you are personhood theorists -- nobody treats every single fertilized egg as a human being."
I think you may need to refine that definition, because I and mine *do* believe that every single fertilized egg is a human being, but I think I know what you mean. Some eggs get fertilized by two sperm and then don't become a baby, they become a problem, and some eggs start to divide into multi-celled things but aren't fertilized, and again become a problem.
Those aren't really "fertilized eggs," though, since they don't produce human DNA, consume, eliminate, and grow. I'm not against aborting a fetus that lodges in the falopian tubes, but I still acknowledge it as a baby and that it is going to die.
I appreciate the angle you're coming from, though. Not every "pregnancy" develops a baby. I just am not fond of personhood theory because it goes against my instincts. A cat is a cat from the moment of conception, just as a dog is a dog, a goose a goose, or a human a human. I prefer to deal in biology - if it has human DNA it's a human, and all humans are people, so all people should be allowed to live and treated with resepct.
We do rather need to decide when a human is a person (we being the world here), but isn't it better to err on the side of life and avoid the possibility that someone just killed an intelligent being with a persoanlity at birth?
My biggest concern is that everything we dole out *does* end up coming back to us three-fold, in my experience (though my Wiccan family members haven't given me enough evidence to convert me). I'd rather be a little cautious than get slammed with bad karma.
Gregory,
You wrote:
"Do you directly kill, or do you remove a mechanical aid to bodily function?"
Many people argued that Schiavo was murdered when a mechanical aid to bodily functions was removed. Others might say that a newborn child left in the woods or a trashcan to die is "murder."
Or, we could flip around your point and say that it's not us that kills when we inject poison, but rather God for stopping the heart after the poison has been injected. For really, all deaths are the natural result of the brain not receiving enough oxygen. So, should we call every death "natural" simply on the premise that really, the brain is naturally not getting enough oxygen?
But let's get back to LST v. euthanasia, all the scenarios above have two things in common:
1. a human decision/interference
2. nature left to its own course
The only difference between them is the level of human involvement and how closely to death a person is left after the event.
So, what really is the difference between a bullet and removal of the feeding tube if the feeding tube will not be replaced? I don't think there is any.
If we take up all the moral evils of injecting painkillers to a severely disabled child, then the same evils match up precisely with removal of LST.
Again, I think the better approach is not to think of LST removal as better morally, but rather better pragmatically because the other approach has more shades of gray. But to say that LST removal is completely black and white would be dishonest, in my opinion.
IMO, if you withdraw food and water, however administered, which the person/child can metabolize, that is indeed on a par with infanticide/active killing. I don't think ANH should be called "life support." I'm not sure this distinction is uppermost in mind in this discussion, but I wanted to throw it in there.
mtraven: You said: There is no hard and fast boundary where personhood is achieved. It's not just a matter of cognitive capacity, it's a social construct -- a person is someone who has been accepted as such in the human community"
Good grief, man! Can't you see the self evident potential for oppression in that? I once debated a personhood theorist who made an assertion of that kind. She said that if a baby is wanted and loved he or she is a person, if not, (I guess we could say "it") is not.
I said, "So, if a homeless person has a stroke and lands in the hospital and nobody cares, he or she is not a person??? But if the same person's daughter discovers he is ill and comes in and loves him, he would be" The answer was yes.
On a lighter note, I guess the number of comments on this thread proves to Wesley that readers of SHS like babies
;)
Wesley: there is potential for abuse, sure. There is always potential. De-humanizing groups is at the core of much racism and antisemitism.
But I maintain that you can't avoid having a theory of personhood. The one in vogue here (based on genetics) is a theory of personhood. Not a very good one, for reasons I've gone into elsewhere. Your philosopher also has a bad theory, based on oversimplied application of his assumptions, or so it seems from your short description. Personhood is not a simple property but a complex social process. The homeless are indeed dehumanized in our society, since our actual social structures violate our principles. Advocates for the homeless work to fix this, that's all to the good. The attempt to fix this bumps up against other forces, such as the notably pitiless nature of capitalism in America. BTW, googling for "homeless personhood" brought up some interesting new stuff, mostly from legal theory.
You folks believe that fetus are persons and work to humanize them. That's OK, but you bump up against other forces, notably a woman's right to control her own body, and the facts of biology which include a mortality rate of greater than 50% for fertilized zygotes.
The point of Pinker's article is that there are reasons from evolutionary psychology why neonates might not be considered persons. This is a psychological, not a moral argument.
No simple answers in these areas, which is what makes them interesting for me.
I'm with mtraven on that one. I think conception-life is really nothing more than a personhood theory that uses a genetic baseline.
Abortion is about two conflicting claims of equality. That issue, aside, personhood theory is explicitly oppressive. That 50% of embryos don't make it to birth, is irrelevant as to their moral status as human lives. Fifty percent of some cancer patients die, too. Most AIDS patients once died of HIV. Alzheimer's is fatal, should we depersonalize its millions of victims? And then exploit them as mere natural resources? Not on my watch!
Wesley, I wish you'd respond to what I actually wrote. Which version of personhood theory are you talking about? As I said, you can't NOT have SOME theory of personhood.
The point about embryo death rates is that we don't actually treat early-stage embryos as persons -- or we'd be having funerals and mourning them. Which we do in the case of AIDS patients, who are fully treated as humans, so I don't see the relevance of that example.
It's complicated -- parents who undergo an involuntary termination of pregnancy may or may not have "personified" the growing fetus. They may mourn, they may not know what to do or how to feel. Our culture doesn't really deal too well with these transitory states.
mtraven: I don't have some theory of personhood. I have a theory of humanhood.
Within the human species, you still must decide when one human is complete enough to get rights deriving from its own individuality. You pick conception. Fine. But by doing that, you must logically adopt a some form of personhood logic.
Your human exceptionalist philosophy is irrelevant to this issue.
Well, human exceptionalism is not the issue. The issue is intrinsic moral worth. It isn't earned. It comes with species membership in my view. And the bottom line for me is that no human being, nascent, born, disabled, dying, demented, or PVS, should ever be deemed an object or mere natural resource. Not hard. Not personhood. Objective and firm.
You still must define a "human being." Implicit in that is precisely the same logic underlying personhood.
Again, I must reiterate why ova and sperm are "mere cells" to you, despite being members of the human species?
Your answer to that is your definition of personhood.
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