Where would we be without experts? Alive!

Where would we be without experts? Alive! | Carl E. Olson | Catholic World Report | Editorial

That's an exaggeration, of course, as much genuine expertise goes into all sorts of good things, from producing food to handling law enforcement to building airplane engines. But some experts—notably those perching and preening in ivory towers—are to be followed with care and even kept at a safe distance, especially if you are a newborn, as The Catholic Herald reports:

A leading British medical journal has published an article calling for the introduction of infanticide for social and medical reasons.

The article in the Journal of Medical Ethics, entitled "After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?" states in its abstract: "After-birth abortion (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled."

The article, written by Alberto Giubilini of the University of Milan and Francesca Minerva of Melbourne University, argues that "foetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons" and consequently a law which permits abortion for certain reasons should permit infanticide on the same grounds.

The full JME article, it appears, is available online. This passage alone should be cause for a pause or three:

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. Indeed, many humans are not considered subjects of a right to life: spare embryos where research on embryo stem cells is permitted, fetuses where abortion is permitted, criminals where capital punishment is legal.

A key assumption is that if a fetus can be aborted, then it follows that an infant can also be killed. That is not, of course, illogical at all, and those who are pro-life—including Popes Paul VI and Bl. John Paul II—have long warned that the clear road from contraceptives to abortion leads to the deadly highway of infanticide and euthanasia; the latter wrote the following in 1995, in Evangelium Vitae:

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