Liberal Daleks

There has been a great hoo-ha in the right-wing press about three academics who have ‘thought outside the envelope’ when declaring that killing newborn babies is no biggie, therefore “morally irrelevant” and comparable to abortion.  They are intelligent people and they knew that they would get this reaction.  Yet they present themselves as satirical caricatures of the kind of scientist one might find in Brave New World, even wearing the death threats as a badge of honour and validating their thoughts, as if just because psychopaths oppose you, what you say must be true.  Those who place the threatening posts are “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society” and who could possibly be against the values of a liberal society, ipso facto, what I say is correct.

I find it amusing that they criticise ‘fanatics’ whilst expounding (they would say propounding) liberal dogma, which, ironically, can be profoundly illiberal.  When Family Guy invited the likes of Rush Limbaugh to make guest appearances, fans were aghast, but Seth MacFarlane argued cutely that what defines liberals is a willingness to hear both sides of the argument.

When it comes to values, everyone, knowingly or not, is seeking to establish the primacy of what they believe.  Merely publishing in The Journal of Medical Ethics doesn’t give one any greater cachet to your views.  To argue “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus [sic] in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual,” is just your point of view – it has categorically nothing to with science. 

Worringly, they seem to adopt the attitude of poorly educated Chinese peasants who dump baby girls on remote mountainsides, by constantly referring to a newborn as female. They posit “We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her [my italics] own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her [my italics].” Thus, it was “not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her [my italics] from developing the potentiality to become a person in the morally relevant sense.”  Are they trying to make those who take extreme measures regarding female babies feel better?

Even more disturbingly, they talk about destroying newborn babies who have Down’s Syndrome, as the condition is not detected in a third of cases by prenatal scanning.  This is eugenicist talk much in vogue in the 1930s.  Who are the fanatics now?

Clearly, Prof Julian Savulescu and Dr Alberto Giubilini can converse flippantly about abortion since, as men, they will never have to go through the procedure, but is flippancy the right tone for a medical publication where you are talking about extermination?  I would very much doubt that Dr Francesca Minerva has ever had to abort a child, sorry, foetus, if indeed she has ever been pregnant.  It is not surprising that they are in favour of euthanasia, another fashionable subject of the 1930s. 

Even as a man, I find their statements on babies as repugnant.  Were a child of mine to have Down’s Syndrome, it would be very hard to take care of them but my love for them would be absolute.  I recognise a woman’s right to choose and respect it – I find the current UK laws on abortion fair, but I would never advise it should be entered into lightly, even were the child disabled.  It is not about left- or right-wing or conservative or liberal.  It is about human dignity, for parents and child(ren). Unlike the arrogant academics, I believe that such people who have conditions seen as debilitating are not ‘morally irrelevant’ – they can make a contribution in who they are.