Ouroboros: "Hate Speech" Worse Than Infanticide?

On Monday morning, this blogpost dropped into my facebook News Feed from Wesley J. Smith. Titled “Killing Baby ‘Non-persons’ -- All Grist for the Bioethics Mill,” he had me intrigued, because I am very used to Smith picking up on the latest bioethical movements from the bowels of medical (un)ethicists from around the globe, signifying what kind of world I must prepare myself and my children to face in the coming years. He reports the latest chilling abstract in the Journal of Medical (Un)Ethics calling for the medical community (and I imagine society at large) to give wholesale acceptance of infanticide “after-birth abortion” of any infant, er..after..birth. Strike that strike; it is infanticide.

The abstract says:

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus' health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that 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.

In the last 48 hours since this idea hit the online world, there has thankfully been a public outcry of horror and indignation at this trident of death. But before I could put words down to express my own rejection of infanticide, this is what got excreted out onto the world next: the journal editor’s defense of the authors’ approval of infanticide. ‘So what’s the big deal?’ Savulescu seems to ask. He cites that under certain circumstances, infanticide is already legal in the giant cemetery plot of land known as the Netherlands.

The logic of the article is consistent, he says, which goes something like: There is no meaningful distinction between fetuses and infants. If we do not assign moral value to fetuses in the womb, then we should not assign moral value to infants either. Therefore, killing infants (infanticide) is morally indistinct from killing fetuses (abortion). The logic is correct. But Savulescu, Giublini, and Minerva are very wrong. The metaphysics and ontology of a human being encompasses all stages of life—the “who” of a human person never changes from the moment of conception. Therefore, if moral value exists at all, it must exist at the beginning of life in order to have any real meaning thereafter. Killing fetuses and infants is a moral travesty.

The endgame of such a philosophy of death is a right to murder and a right to be murdered--not much different than stripping down to your skivvies and living the rest of your life in the Peruvian rainforest just fighting to survive each day. Civilization, laws, and abiding by the reality of objective moral values are the difference between a truly progressive society and barbarism. It is the reason Susan Smith is serving a life sentence in prison. If Savulescu, Guiblini, and Minerva preach the worldview worth actualizing, we ought to exonerate Susan Smith, laud her the title “Superfrau,” and give her another car to drown more toddlers in a lake, because medical (un)ethicists have decided that there are no reasons despicable enough from which to save their lives.

But it gets better! Liberal is as liberal does, Momma always said. The main reason why Savulescu decided to stick up for his colleagues is not found in the substance of what they wrote but in the way he perceives they were treated on blogs! [Cough] If I knew at the beginning it was this easy to take his family jewels and put them in a thimble, I wouldn’t have bothered reading his defense. So, he reprints and rails against some unflattering ‘misspellings’ of Giublini and Minerva’s names and some visceral adjectives having to do with political progressivism, sprinkled with a few colorful expletives. Then, he sings the song of classic liberal indignation. “Racist!” “Hate speech!” he croons. Sadly for him, Savulescu has argued his way into a lonely solo. Such throaty whine is the symptom of a permanent laryngitis. He sang away his right to moral outrage the moment he believed it is permissible to kill the innocent among us.

My outlook on the human future teeters on the last vestiges of civilization’s ability to recognize objective moral transgressions when it encounters them. With our culture swimming and reveling in the culture of death, I wonder how enterprises such as the efforts to end sex trafficking and slavery will ever gain a moral foothold in any meaningful way. Sure, we are rightfully appalled by the utter depravity of infanticide, but for how long? As Peter Singer slowly becomes a household name, will his ideas also become household ideas? It has happened in a radically relativized society before, somewhere in the neighborhood of Germany in the 1930s. Our postmodern culture parades about like a Caesar, thinking it has conquered the darkness of objectivity for the light of self-directed moralism. All I can say is "beware the Ides of March." Not even Hitler (or even Singer!) would kill his own mother, yet taken to the logical end, these medical (un)ethics mean the death of many mothers and babies, including their own.

Ouroboros.

Making Feminists Cringe. Oh Well. -5-

N.O.W. Silent on Inhumane Treatment of Women

Chalk another one up for N.O.W.'s failures to stand up for better treatment of women everywhere. This morning, news broke that British teacher in Sudan, Gilliam Gibbons, has been arrested and faces 40 lashes and possible jail time for allowing a teddy bear to be named Muhammed in a classroom activity. The charge: insulting Islam.

I'm not going to run the gamut of how ridiculous this situation in Sudan is; there are too many obvious points about how wrong the authorities in Sudan are. They should release Ms. Gibbons and apologize for threatening to give her 40 lashes (which is potentially fatal).

At any rate, the real beef on this end is that N.O.W. again has failed to even make a statement criticizing this arrest and potential inhumane treatment of an innocent women. It is a no-brainer that N.O.W. should defend Ms. Gibbons. According to Fox News,

A spokeswoman for the National Organization for Women said the situation
"is definintely on the radar, and N.O.W. is not ignoring it. But she added that
the U.S.-based organization is "not putting out a statement or taking a
position."

Well, if they bothered to say anything at all, why not make a statement? Unless, of course, they aren't really about the business of helping women out after all.

Making Feminsts Cringe. Oh Well. -4-

How to Shut Feminists Up: show them the news

This news story about a woman being gang-raped in Saudi Arabia and then sentenced to 90 lashes, which then was upgraded to 200 lashes plus six months prison time is just one horrific example in a mountainside of incidents of women across the globe suffering abuse, torture, and inhumane treatment. And few people are doing anything about it, least of all feminists in America.

The above story is over a year old, and not a single feminist organization has spoken out, condemned, nor called any body of government to intervene on the behalf of this victim. Why not?

Most spokeswomen hem and hah, but the real reason is that they don't really care all that much, even though they are supposedly for women. The liberal feminists in this country concern themselves only about liberal policies of America: maintaining legal abortions and keeping liberal politicians in office, even if that means abandoning women in other countries to the savageries of men.

Thanks ladies. Oops, women. If this poor Saudi woman makes it out of this ordeal alive, she'll have plenty of thanks for you, too.

(photo credit: photo taken by Luis E. Cerezo and is unrelated to the accompanying news story.)

Teri Rhodes Multiple Choice; "D," None of the Above

After this news story, I scoured blogs for commentaries on the following:

August 12, 2007: Teri Rhodes, 18, college student at Mercyhurst College in PA, gave birth to a baby girl in her bathroom and used a plastic bag to suffocate her while taking a shower in the bathtub where she laid the baby. The baby literally died at Rhodes' feet. Rhodes is now charged with murder and conspiracy to hide a death of a baby. The handful of blogs that have written about this incident have been disapproving of Rhodes committing murder, but not one blogger has placed the final blame on this woman for the death of her newborn baby.

Instead, I perused blogs and comments about that poor girl needing psychotherapy, education, yada yada, and how poverty increases the infanticide rate. I also read blogs that chastised society for not providing better prenatal and postnatal care with counseling, chastised pharmacists for refusing to dispense morning after pills, and even suggested that Rhodes should have had gotten an abortion, as if that were a more preferable method of disposing of her daughter. I also caught comments that the physicians in charge of Rhodes care were incompetent to diagnose her pregancy (this deserves a "no duh!"), and thus absolving Rhodes of some of the blame.

Excuse A: Infanticide is common among young, poor, uneducated females anywhere in the world. We might consider Rhodes young for being an American, but at 18, she's legally an adult and way older than what's considered young by the world's stats. Poor and uneducated at a private Catholic college majoring in Biology and Medical Technology? Hardly.

Excuse B: Pregnant women need care and counseling and sex ed to make rational decisions about pregancy and birth and...I guess murder as well. Last time I checked, there are pregnancy resources everywhere, especially on the internet, where Rhodes spent lots of time net searching for ways to kill her unborn baby in the months leading up to birth. Rhodes had ready access to all of the above, so her actions seem perfectly rational to me. Placing additional blame on the incompetence of the college's sports physician for not detecting what should have been an obvious pregancy does get a nod (Rhodes received a physical two days before giving birth in which he did ask her about, and she denied, pregancy). The doctor may have dropped the ball, but it doesn't remove any blame from Rhodes.

Excuse C: Rhodes could have gotten an abortion or taken the morning after pill. Granted, those options are legal and would have spared Rhodes a murder charge. Even if she opted for either alternative, however, the result would still have been the same: death.

I have a deep compassion for Rhodes being alone in her ordeal and for what her emotional states must have been throughout her pregancy. She does need counseling, and lots of it...while she's in jail. She's a rebellious, irresponsible, lying murderer.

She's rebellious for thinking that having sex before marriage is a good idea (against her Catholic upbringing);

Irresponsible if she thinks that sex doesn't produce a baby that she has obligations to;

Lying for denying her pregancy and any help related to pregancy;

And murder, for all the obvious reasons.

Legally and morally, Rhodes is a mess, and because she chose to go it alone, she alone should bear the blame, not all the other people above who might have somehow changed her circumstances for her. That is the point, missed and ignored as it is.

In case you're wondering, this hits home for me. I have a daughter who one day might get pregnant before marriage, God forbid. I pray for Rhodes, that the severity of her actions impacts her, that she realizes some truths about herself, and finally, that she learns of redemption in the person of Christ. There's more to this story that I have to express...I'll have to put in another post.