This poster (circa 1938) reads: "60,000 Reichmarks is what this person suffering from a hereditary defect costs the People's community during his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money, too. Read '[A] New People,' the monthly magazine from the Bureau of Race Politics of the NSDAP."
Sophie: The Wikipedia article on the Aktion T4 Programme is not bad. I'll link to some others shortly when I return.
By ANDREW FERGUSON
15 March 2012On the list of the world’s most unnecessary occupations—aromatherapist, golf pro, journalism professor, vice president of the United States—that of medical ethicist ranks very high. They are happily employed by pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and other outposts of the vast medical-industrial combine, where their job is to advise the boss to go ahead and do what he was going to do anyway (“Put it on the market!” “Pull the plug on the geezer!”). They also attend conferences where they take turns sitting on panels talking with one another and then sitting in the audience watching panels of other medical ethicists talking with one another. Their professional specialty is the “thought experiment,” which is the best kind of experiment because you don’t have to buy test tubes or leave the office. And sometimes they get jobs at universities, teaching other people to become ethicists. It is a cozy, happy world they live in.
But it was painfully roiled last month, when a pair of medical ethicists took to their profession’s bible, the Journal of Medical Ethics, and published an essay with a misleadingly inconclusive title: “After-birth Abortion: Why should the baby live?” It was a misleading title because the authors believe the answer to the question is: “Beats me.”
Right at the top, the ethicists summarized the point of their article. “What we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.”
The argument made by the authors—Alberto Giubilini and Francesca
Minerva, both of them affliliated with prestigious universities in
Australia and ethicists of pristine reputation—runs as follows. Let’s
suppose a woman gets pregnant. She decides to go ahead and have the baby
on the assumption that her personal circumstances, and her views on
such things as baby-raising, will remain the same through the day she
gives birth and beyond.
Then she gives birth. Perhaps the baby is disabled or suffers a
disease. Perhaps her boyfriend or (if she’s old-fashioned) her husband
abandons her, leaving her in financial peril. Or perhaps she’s decided
that she’s just not the mothering kind, for, as the authors write,
“having a child can itself be an unbearable burden for the psychological
health of the woman or for her already existing children, regardless of
the condition of the fetus.”
The authors point out that each of these conditions—the baby is
sick or suffering, the baby will be a financial hardship, the baby will
be personally troublesome—is now “largely accepted” as a good reason
for a mother to abort her baby before he’s born. So why not after?
“When circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion
should be permissible.” (Their italics.) Western societies approve
abortion because they have reached a consensus that a fetus is not a
person; they should acknowledge that by the same definition a newborn
isn’t a person either. Neither fetus nor baby has developed a sufficient
sense of his own life to know what it would be like to be deprived of
it. The kid will never know the difference, in other words. A newborn
baby is just a fetus who’s hung around a bit too long.
As the authors acknowledge, this makes an “after-birth abortion” a
tricky business. You have to get to the infant before he develops “those
properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an
individual.” It’s a race against time.
The article doesn’t go on for more than 1,500 words, but for
non-ethicists it has a high surprise-per-word ratio. The information
that newborn babies aren’t people is just the beginning. A reader learns
that “many non-human animals … are persons” and therefore enjoy a
“right to life.” (Such ruminative ruminants, unlike babies, are
self-aware enough to know that getting killed will entail a “loss of
value.”) The authors don’t tell us which species these “non-human
persons” belong to, but it’s safe to say that you don’t want to take a
medical ethicist to dinner at Outback.
But what about adoption, you ask. The authors ask that question too,
noting that some people—you and me, for example—might think that
adoption could buy enough time for the unwanted newborn to technically
become a person and “possibly increase the happiness of the people
involved.” But this is not a viable option, if you’ll forgive the
expression. A mother who kills her newborn baby, the authors report, is
forced to “accept the irreversibility of the loss.” By contrast, a
mother who gives her baby up for adoption “might suffer psychological
distress.” And for a very simple reason: These mothers “often dream that
their child will return to them. This makes it difficult to accept the
reality of the loss because they can never be quite sure whether or not
it is irreversible.” It’s simpler for all concerned just to make sure
the loss can’t be reversed. It’ll spare Mom a lot of heartbreak.
Now, it’s at this point in the Journal of Medical Ethics
that many readers will begin to suspect, as I did, that their legs are
being not very subtly pulled. The inversion that the argument entails is
Swiftian—a twenty-first-century Modest Proposal without the
cannibalism (for now). Jonathan Swift’s original Modest Proposal called
for killing Irish children to prevent them “from being a burden to their
parents.” It was death by compassion, the killing of innocents based on
a surfeit of fellow-feeling. The authors agree that compassion itself
demands the death of newborns. Unlike Swift, though, they aren’t
kidding.
They get you coming and going, these guys. They assume—and they
won’t get much argument from their peers in the profession—that
“mentally impaired” infants are eligible for elimination because they
will never develop the properties necessary to be fully human. Then they
discuss Treacher-Collins syndrome, which causes facial deformities and
respiratory ailments but no mental impairment. Kids with TCS are “fully
aware of their condition, of being different from other people and of
all the problems their pathology entails,” and are therefore, to spare
them a life of such unpleasant awareness, eligible for elimination
too—because they are not mentally impaired. The threshold to this “right to life” just gets higher and higher, the more you think about it.
And of course it is their business to think about it. It’s what
medical ethicists get paid to do: cogitate, cogitate, cogitate. As
“After-birth Abortion” spread around the world and gained wide
publicity—that damned Internet —non-ethicists greeted it with
derision or shock or worse. The authors and the editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics
were themselves shocked at the response. As their inboxes flooded with
hate mail, the authors composed an apology of sorts that non-ethicists
will find more revealing even than the original paper.
“We are really sorry that many people, who do not share the
background of the intended audience for this article, felt offended,
outraged, or even threatened,” they wrote. “The article was supposed to
be read by other fellow bioethicists who were already familiar with this
topic and our arguments.” It was a thought experiment. After all, among medical ethicists “this debate”—about when it’s proper to kill babies—“has been going on for 40 years.”
So that’s what they’ve been talking about in all those panel
discussions! The authors thought they were merely taking the next step
in a train of logic that was set in motion, and has been widely
accepted, since their profession was invented in the 1960s. And of
course they were.
The outrage directed at their article came from
laymen—people unsophisticated in contemporary ethics. Medical
ethicists in general expressed few objections, only a minor annoyance
that the authors had let the cat out of the bag. A few days after it was
posted the article was removed from the publicly accessible area of the
Journal’s website, sending it back to that happy, cozy world.
You’d have to be very, very well trained in ethics to see the
authors’ argument as a morally acceptable extension of their premises,
but you can’t deny the logic of it. The rest of us will see in the
argument an extension of its premises into self-evident absurdity.
Pro-lifers should take note. For years, in public argument, pro-choicers
have mocked them for not following their belief in a fetus’s humanity
to its logical end. Shouldn’t you execute doctors who perform abortions? Why don’t you have funerals for miscarriages?
As one pro-choice wag, writing about the Republicans’ pro-life platform, put it in the Washington Post a few years ago: “The official position of the Republican Party is that women who have abortions should be executed.”
And now we know the pro-choice position is that children born with a
facial deformity should be executed too, as long as you get to them
quick enough. Unwittingly the insouciant authors of “After-birth
Abortion” have shown where pro-choicers wind up if they follow their
belief about fetuses to its logical end. They’ve performed a public
service. Could it be that medical ethicists really are more useful than
aromatherapists?
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
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