Yowza. Thanks for sharing this. I kind of can’t believe it’s been published in a peer-reviewed journal… Is this an elaborate joke? I have never heard of the term ‘after-birth abortion.’ Are they just making fun of politically correct language here, or are they taking themselves seriously? I can’t tell.
It does seem to me to be an exploration of some of the logical consequences of (some ways of presenting) the morality of abortion. Their conclusion is pretty damn disturbing:
“What we are suggesting is that, if interests of actual people should prevail, then after-birth abortion should be considered a permissible option for women who would be damaged by giving up their newborns for adoption.”
Speaking of ‘actual people,’ I am having trouble understanding this part:
“The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.
Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’. We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her. This means that many non-human animals and mentally retarded human individuals are persons, but that all the individuals who are not in the condition of attributing any value to their own existence are not persons. Merely being human is not in itself a reason for ascribing someone a right to life.”
How can a non-human animal be a person while a human infant is not??? Their definition of personhood just seems to be an organism that values its life, and I think they are taking an extremely limited and reductivist view here.
On a side note, last night I was listening to a radio show about the extremely high rates of sex selection abortions in Azerbaijan. It was so disturbing, I had to turn it off.
Excuse me, I’ve got to get back to the humanities now…