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Nos genuflectitur ad non princeps sed Princeps Pacem!
Listen, O isles, unto me; and hearken, ye people, from far; The LORD hath called me from the womb; from the bowels of my mother hath he made mention of my name. (Isaiah 49:1 KJV)
Posted on 03/09/2012 4:26:17 PM PST by wagglebee
The debate over abortion comes down to one essential issue - the moral status of the unborn child. Those making the case for the legalization of abortion argue that the developing fetus lacks a moral status that would trump a woman's desire to abort the child. Those arguing against abortion do so by making the opposite claim; that the unborn child, precisely because it is a developing human being, possesses a moral status by the very fact of its human existence that would clearly trump any rationale offered for its willful destruction.
This central issue is often obscured in both public argument and private conversations about abortion, but it remains the essential question. We have laws against homicide, and if the unborn child is recognized legally and morally as a human being, abortion would be rightly seen as murder.
In the main, abortion rights advocates have drawn the moral line at the moment of birth. That is why, even with our contemporary knowledge of the developing fetus, abortion rights activists have persistently argued in favor of abortions right up to the moment of birth. Anyone doubting this claim needs only to consider the unified opposition of leading abortion rights advocates to restrictions on late-term abortions.
From the beginning of the controversy over abortion, this supposedly bright line of the moment of birth has been unstable. Abortion rights activists have even opposed efforts to restrict the gruesome reality known as partial-birth abortions. The moment of birth has never been the bright line of safety that the defenders of abortion have claimed.
Now, an even more chilling development comes in the form of an article just published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Professors Alberto Giubilini of the University of Milan and Francesca Minerva of the University of Melbourne and Oxford University, now argue for the morality and legalization of "after-birth abortion."
These authors do not hide their agenda. They are calling for the legal killing of newborn children.
The argument put forth in their article bears a haunting resemblance to the proposal advocated by Dr. Peter Singer of Princeton University, who has argued that the killing of a newborn baby, known as infanticide, should be allowable up to the point that the child develops some ability to communicate and to anticipate the future.
Giubilini and Minerva now argue that newborn human infants lack the ability to anticipate the future, and thus that after-birth abortions should be permitted.
The authors explain that they prefer the term "after-birth abortion" to "infanticide" because their term makes clear the fact that the argument comes down to the fact that the birth of the child is not morally significant.
They propose two justifying arguments:
First: "The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus, that is, neither can be considered a 'person' in a morally relevant sense."
Second: "It is not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to be a person in the morally relevant sense."
Thus: "The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack the properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual."
Those assertions are as chilling as anything yet to appear in the academic literature of medical ethics. This is a straightforward argument for the permissibility of murdering newborn human infants. The authors make their argument with the full intention of seeing this transformed into public policy. Further, they go on to demonstrate the undiluted evil of their proposal by refusing even to set an upper limit on the permissible age of a child to be killed by "after-birth abortion."
These "medical ethicists" argue that a traditional abortion is a preferred option, but then state:
"Abortions at an early stage are the best option, for both psychological and physical reasons. However, if a disease has not been detected during the pregnancy, if something went wrong during the delivery, or if economical, social, or psychological circumstances change such that taking care of the offspring becomes an unbearable burden on someone, then people should be given the chance of not being forced to do something they cannot afford."
Nothing could possibly justify the killing of a child, but these professors are so bold as to argue that even "economical, social, or psychological circumstances" would be sufficient justification.
This article in the Journal of Medical Ethics is a clear signal of just how much ground has been lost to the Culture of Death. A culture that grows accustomed to death in the womb will soon contemplate killing in the nursery. The very fact that this article was published in a peer-reviewed academic journal is an indication of the peril we face.
For years now, pro-life activists have been lectured that "slippery slope" arguments are false. This article makes clear the fact that our warnings have not been based in a slippery slope argument, but in the very reality of abortion. Abortion implies infanticide. If the unborn child lacks sufficient moral status by the fact that it is unborn, then the baby in the nursery, it is now argued, has also not yet developed human personhood.
The publication of this article signals the fact that a medical debate on this question has been ongoing. The only sane response to this argument is the affirmation of the objective moral status of the human being at every point of development, from fertilization until natural death. Anything less than the affirmation of full humanity puts every single human being at risk of being designated as not "a person in the morally relevant sense."
Something very deadly this way comes. This argument will not remain limited to the pages of an academic journal. The murderous appetite of the Culture of Death will never be satisfied.
Say What?
So when is it just plain ole murder instead of abortion.
A day, A week, A Month, 10 Years, etc.
Abortion – which is nothing less than the extinguishing of a human life - calls into question a much larger issue, and that is the fundamental issue of the right to life itself. Progressives prefer to subsume the value of this individual pre-born life under a cloud of group rights. For to acknowledge the right of the unborn to live is to acknowledge that an individual life has intrinsic value. And that is pure poison to the progressive utopianist meme.
I submit that the horrors of the last 150 years are the direct result of the rise of the will to power and its usurpation of the role that individual conscience, moral restraint and religious sanction used to play in Western human affairs. It is about the desire for the power to control the lives of others down to the smallest details. The great irony is that this interventionist (and ultimately, eliminationist) mindset is precisely what so-called progressives accuse conservatives of harboring. Those who call themselves ‘progressives’ above all desire to wield the power to decide who lives and who dies.
Here is the Vulcan mind-meld translation of the core premise of the Left: you have no right to live. By their lights, you are no more than a thing, an animal, or a machine. Therefore, you have no right to the fruits of your labors. You are a ‘resource’ at best, a fungible, and ultimately disposable asset of the State. Or you are in their way and must be eliminated. There’s the last 200 years of leftist philosophy and its practical consequences in a nutshell.
The progressive refusal to acknowledge the value of individual human life over an evanescent conflation of group rights and collectivist ideology is one of the principal reasons why no peace, no accommodation, no compromise can ever be made with them. Theirs is a reckless, willful and fundamentally evil disregard for the most fundamental of all of our rights: and that is the individual’s right to live.
This premise is, has been, and continues to be central to the justification for the wholesale slaughter of millions of human beings - and the enslavement and impoverishment of hundreds of millions more. I have written a modest essay concerning the idea of killers without conscience and the pedigree of their ideas. These ideas are on display in the details of 0bamacare, for example. 0bamacare represents the deliberate and willful devaluation of human life - the reduction of people to mere objects. That is the next step on the way to physician-assisted suicide and, if it is not stopped, government-mandated euthanasia.
And worse. Far, far worse. But that's precisely the intent of the so-called "Obamacare" legislation.
Why else would modernity’s Left seek to 'move the goalposts' that define life? And further, to define the value of individual life by its utility? "Utility" - to whom or for what? We have moved from questioning whether any sane human being should be allowed to make such decisions to dithering over who will get to decide. This is monstrous. And if any of you feel that this is hyperbole or tinfoil hattery, consider the source of such ideas.
Listen to Dr. Peter Singer speaking blithely of extending that 'right to choose' to children as old as 28 months! Why? Because Singer argues that at that age, well... they're not fully conscious and capable of reason! Is this some crackpot who no one takes seriously? Hardly. Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. His ideas are universally applauded within academia.
Why else would we hear of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel - Rahm Emanuels brother - also an 'advisor' to 0bama, advocating the assessment of the relative 'quality of life' under the aegis of his innocuous-sounding “Complete Lives” program? Emanuel’s guidelines are strictly utilitarian, and are based in part upon the notion of an individual’s ‘value to society’.
Emmanuel cites this entry from the Jan. 31, 2009 edition of the British medical journal Lancet:
"When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated." This may be justified by public opinion, since "broad consensus favours adolescents over very young infants and young adults over very elderly people.""Strict youngest-first allocation directs scarce resources predominantly to infants. This approach seems incorrect. The death of a 20-year-old woman is intuitively worse than that of a 2-month-old girl, even though the baby has had less life. The 20-year-old has a much more developed personality than the infant, and has drawn upon the investment of others to begin as-yet-unfulfilled projects.... Adolescents have received substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, by contrast, have not yet received these investments.... It is terrible when an infant dies, but worse, most people think, when a three-year-old child dies, and worse still when an adolescent does."
Again, this is an argument for the value of human life based upon its social utility and it is not difficult to trace this view of human life back to its pedigree in early-20th century eugenics. Dr. Emanuel claims further that this system will not be subject to corruption – at best, this fantasy assumes that all men are angels and the millennium has arrived. Systems such as this one, once entrenched, are easily co-opted by fiat and placed in the service of those who wish to arrogate the power of life and death to themselves. Dr. Emanuel offers the following as commentary to the Lancet article:
“Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years. Treating 65-year-olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not.”
Some persist in crediting Dr. Emanuel with an unblinking and fearless rationality. It will be smug self-congratulation and high fives all around for high-minded progressives until they face the real and practical application of the utilitarian praxis of what Dr. Emanuel and his ilk advocate. Say, for example, when an unelected and unaccountable government panel - not them or their doctor - decides that their premature newborn infant will receive only painkillers because ‘society’ has nothing ‘invested’ in the baby and the calculus of the cost-benefit trade-off indicates that the care required will cost too much and have too uncertain an outcome. Or, when they discover that the treatment for their particular malady is now ‘off the menu’ because it hasn’t met one of the many new Federally-mandated prerequisites for its use and application. A paperwork detail, to be sure. But too late for them. Imagine the dismay when they find out that the cancer that their Mom or Dad survived in their sixties is no longer being treated because, after all, it doesn’t serve the ‘common good’ to spend limited resources on the elderly - excuse me, elderly units as 0bamacare now deems them - in the last few months of their life, does it? But they'll doubtless take comfort in the knowledge that those resources will go to “people of worth,” as genocide enthusiast and Obama advisor Audrey Thomason defines them. Won’t they?
So the question now becomes: what sort of society, what sort of existence will we have when -
1. Those goalposts defining the beginning and the end of life at last converge?
2. The decision as to who lives and who dies eventually passes from individuals and to the state - as it most surely will if progressives are allowed to have their way?
The answer is the stuff of your worst nightmares. If that seems a tad, well, extreme to some of you, consider this: there are those who believe that Dr. Emanuel deserves a medal for his fearless and enlightened rationality. Dr. Singer's prescription for infanticide without guilt are warmly applauded in the halls of academe. Far from being an exercise in ivory-tower utopian fantasy, the ideas advocated by the likes of Peter Singer, the ‘progressive’ concepts of how we should regard human life have been given currency in the Journal of Medical Ethics, a peer reviewed journal for health professionals and researchers in medical ethics. There, a recently published article by two Australian philosophers, Alberto Giubilini and Francesa Minerva, poses the question: "After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?" Why, indeed? Again, ask yourselves this: how did we get from whether those decisions should be made to who will be making those decisions?
These ideas have consequences: they pave the road to a nightmare world of slaughter and atrocity – and if you don’t think so, then you haven’t been paying attention to the history of the last 200 years. Progressives, and more importantly those whom they serve are on the verge of achieving their sick utopian dreams. The nudge, the gradual squeeze - and then the shove into submission, slavery and oblivion. This is the foundation and the prerequisite for the sort of world that Orwell envisioned in his 1984, a world in which neither love, nor mercy, nor hope survive. It is a world where all of your hopes, aspirations and dreams, all of your love of country and family count for naught, for those hopes and aspirations - and you - will be extinguished as if you never had existed. Because you surely must be if these will-to-power driven monsters are to rule without fear of opposition. One of the chief instruments to achieving their ambitions has and continues to be the substitution of a culture of death for the culture of life that lies at the heart of the values that uphold Western civilization.
Pope John Paul II in his 1995 work, The Gospel of Life made this observation regarding the rise of the culture of death in modern times:
This reality is characterized by the emergence of a culture which denies solidarity and in many cases takes the form of a veritable "culture of death". This culture is actively fostered by powerful cultural, economic and political currents which encourage an idea of society excessively concerned with efficiency. Looking at the situation from this point of view, it is possible to speak in a certain sense of a war of the powerful against the weak: a life which would require greater acceptance, love and care is considered useless, or held to be an intolerable burden, and is therefore rejected in one way or another. A person who, because of illness, handicap or, more simply, just by existing, compromises the well-being or life-style of those who are more favored tends to be looked upon as an enemy to be resisted or eliminated. In this way a kind of "conspiracy against life" is unleashed. This conspiracy involves not only individuals in their personal, family or group relationships, but goes far beyond, to the point of damaging and distorting, at the international level, relations between peoples and States.
There is only one way the monsters who seek to impose such a hellish existence on this world can be stopped. Only one way.
It'll happen so fast it'll make your head spin. We're dealing with evil here - pure, naked, murderous evil.
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Didn’t one of Obama’s Czars, I think Holdren, who was “science czar”, say that a child isn’t really a person until about 5 years of age?
Very true. Pre-Christianity, many babies and toddlers were killed or left to die. In the post-Christian West of 2012, pre-born babies and post-birth babies are being murdered by their mothers in the name of feminism.
What one way?
The core of the Didache was written in the 40’s A.D.
The authors were Paul and Barnabus.
I’m not going to any concerts with you.
Amazing and tragic what a people who are their own gods can become and believe.
Genesis 3:4 -5 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
IMHO each person who goes to h*ll has his own pirate one crafted just for them.For example those who support and advocate these sort of thing end up day after day experiencing what a baby feels during an abortion over and over.....
If you have to ask...
It does raise the question, is it murder if you murder a murderer?
Here’s the way I see it ...
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution guarantees equal protection under the law.
Therefore we must examine, at what point in the process of baby making do the rights of the father legally become separated from the rights of the mother? The fact of the matter is that up to the moment of conception each enjoy exactly the same reproductive rights and duties.
HOWEVER, according to settled law reviewed by the Supreme Court of The United States, at the moment of conception, the rights of the father are held in abeyance until the Mother determines her course of action. She can legally choose to abort or deliver the baby ... the father is not offered that choice. She can legally choose not to inform the father and deny him his legally guaranteed parental rights only to come after him later once she realizes she is, again, legally entitled to compensation from the father, eg: Child Support.
Because of the equal protection amendment AND because we know at exactly what point the rights of the involved parties diverge, we know exactly WHEN things change. This must mean that the conceived ovum is entitled to and has rights of its own which are powerful enough to supersede the rights of others. How else can it affect the legal rights of two other people so significantly?
The abortion rights folks directly contradict themselves when they say “ ...people should be given the chance of not being forced to do something they cannot afford.”
Until the laws are changed giving men the SAME right to choose NOT to be forced to do something they cannot afford (Child support) at the same time ... read that again ... AT THE SAME TIME, they are not being afforded equal treatment under the law!
Think about the implications of something’s ability to directly effect the application of law simply by the fact of its existence. It must be significant.
Hey Folks you dont have to look to these guys from where ever they are from,Check Out Obamacare Chairman of the Comparative Efeectiveness Research Panel,Ezekiel Emmanuel,and His Program Of “Complete Lives System”. Humans Between the ages of 15 and 45 are the Preferred ones,anyone outside those age Groups including New borns are expendable.This guy is WRITING Obamacare Policy behind the scenes and I have Not Heard ONE person anywhere even Mention his Name or discuss his writings,this Guy and his Panel were given a Billion dollars in Obamas Stimulus Bill!
Something very deadly this way comes. This argument will not remain limited to the pages of an academic journal. The murderous appetite of the Culture of Death will never be satisfied.
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The author is right, and although it has been years since the campaign for the legal murder of our fellow human beings began, when looking back on how far we have come it seems to have happened in the blink of an eye.
“After-Birth Abortion” = Murder. We need to re-enact Normandy Liberation, on the shores of the Potomac.
Sooner or later, it’ll come to you.
Perhaps with your prematurely-final breath.
ARE YOU THREATENING ME?
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