Columns

MY CUP IS HALF FULL

MARK PICKUP

In a recent column, I addressed the idea of Christian perinatal hospice (WCR, Feb. 27). It is a concept whereby parents facing a pregnancy involving a terminally ill unborn child are supported to carry their baby to term and prepare for their child's death.

No sooner had I written the column, I came across a disturbing article in the March 23 edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics entitled "After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?" It was written by Dr. Alberto Giugilini at the University of Melbourne in Australia and Francesca Minerva who is associated with Oxford's Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics in the United Kingdom.

In the article, Giugilini and Minerva state: "We claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be. Such circumstances include cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at risk."

They argue that newborn babies are only potential persons without any interests and should be subject to the interests of actual persons of their families.

POTENTIAL PERSON

They try to extend the abortion mentality beyond birth: "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."

Giugilini and Minerva do not identify when they think newborn babies become actual people.

Their argument is not new, nor are they the only ones to advocate such things in the callous Brave New World of secular bioethics. American ethics professor at the University of Virginia and Harvard, Joseph Fletcher (1905-91) was a pioneer of bioethics.

Forty years ago, he advocated "post-birth abortion" for disabled newborns. His criteria for "post-birth abortion" was simple: If a baby does not increase happiness or reduce human suffering then the baby should die.

NO MORAL RIGHT

Princeton University professor Peter Singer has argued infants have no moral right to life because they are not "persons." In an interview he was asked when he thought an infant becomes a person? He said "sometime during the first year of life."

These barbaric views come from professors at prestigious universities. What they espouse is being increasingly accepted in elite society and put into practice.

Why is the term "after-birth abortion" used instead of infanticide? Could it be that abortion is so pervasive and the abortion mentality so widely accepted, that couching infanticide in the abortion mentality is perceived as an easier sell to society?

After all, the culture has coarsened to the point where killing disabled newborns is accepted, but not yet so coarse as to sanction the killing of healthy but unwanted babies. The idea will take some - how should I say it? - marketing.

Remember that abortion had to be marketed in the 1960s to soften public attitudes. Previous generations would be horrified at the widespread abortion we now have in Canada. What was unacceptable in the past becomes tolerable today and commonplace tomorrow, unless checked by moral absolutes.

This is where the Church has a preserving role to play in society. We must stand up for the value of every human life even in a culture that no longer believes it (especially in a culture that no longer believes it).

Jesus told us to be salt of the earth (Matthew 5.13). In the ancient world salt was used as a preservative. That is what we are to be in our world. Western Christian civilization and its morality may seem to be crumbling around us but we are called to stand in the gap for our Lord.

SANCTITY OF LIFE

Do not think this is unique to us. The Catholic Church has often stood firm for the sanctity of life in equally brutal times in the past.

In the first paragraph of Pope John Paul's encyclical The Gospel of Life, he wrote: "The Gospel of life is at the heart of Jesus' message. Lovingly received day after day by the Church, it is preached with dauntless fidelity as 'good news' to people of every age and culture."

You and I must take that beautiful message to our dying culture. Everyone is loved by God - even unwanted newborn babies.