Again and again, those of us who struggle to protect the most vulnerable, the weakest, among us, the unborn child, have pointed out that the same logic being advanced by supporters of abortion can be used to argue that it should be permissible to kill a newborn child. Now we have a pair of philosophers making that very argument in the February 23, 2012 issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics:
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.
The paper consists of an argument to support this conclusion. I found it very difficult to read without throwing my Macbook Pro across the room. This is the most insidious thing I have ever seen. A cold and calculated argument for the moral acceptability of murdering babies.
If you have the stomach, read a PDF of the entire thing here (a copy of the PDF downloaded from the JME website).
