Raising the prospects of a world without birth defects, a technique designed by Stanford biophysicist Stephen Quake, could bring America back to its Eugenics past.
Heralding a not-distant future when many fetal traits, from deadly disease to hair color, can be discovered through a the $1,200 test which analyzes fetal DNA in a mother who is 10 weeks pregnant, is being offered to doctors by Verinata Health. According to Stanford University law professor, Hank Greely, the controversy over abortion “is about to be hit by a tsunami of new science.”
A similar test is already available from San Diego based Sequenom and at least two other San Francisco Bay area companies plan to offer noninvasive prenatal genetic testing which currently only seeks major abnormalities on three chromosomes: 13, 18, and 21. With around 4.5 million U.S. births a year, of which an estimated 750,000 are high risk due to age or family history, the financial gain to developers of these new tests is huge. In addition to the three chromosomes listed above, the test will also reveal the sex of the baby.
Within the next 5 years, Greely says, “it seems likely that a simple blood test will be able to provide genetic results . . .not just for Down syndrome but cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, Tay-Sachs disease and a host of other diseases.” Greely says he can’t see a parent aborting a baby because it is blond or doesn’t have the best genes to become an athlete “but I do think it will greatly increase the number of babies aborted for mainly medical reasons, and sometimes for non-medical reasons, like sex, because it is so much easier to find out. And you find out faster. You can make a decision before anyone else really knows you are pregnant – and when abortions are less complicated, medically and socially.”
Members of the pro-life community said they would welcome the test if it was used to give parents time to prepare for the birth of a handicapped infant. “But, if it’s a search-and-destroy mission, where the baby is aborted, we are not in favor of it. I don’t think the world is a better place without these babies. It’s getting close to Nazi eugenics, isn’t it, to decide who lives. If a baby is shown to have a cleft palate, do they die?
Michael Katz, medical director of the March of Dimes says that “it is difficult to know how people will act on this information.”
Unfortunately, I can answer that question. We have raised at least two generations who believe that an unborn baby is only a fetus – not a human being. A clue to the monsters we have allowed to be created come from two eugenicists from Melbourne, Australia, who recently published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, an arguement for the killing of babies post-birth.
Alberto Giubilini from Monash University, and Francesca Minerva from the Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne, published a piece called “After-birth Abortion: why should the baby live?”
Both point out that they prefer the term after-birth to infanticide, which, by the way, is the murder of a newborn more than one day old. The practice of infanticide has taken many forms over the centuries such as the practice of child sacrifice or the favorite in ancient Europe and Asia of abandonment to die of exposure or to become a food source for wild animals.
They prefer infanticide because it emphasizes that the moral status of the individual killed [newborn baby] is comparable with that of a fetus on which abortions are legally performed.
According to these two morons, after-birth abortion should be considered acceptable “when the newborn would put the well being of a family at risk even if the child had potential for an acceptable life.“ They cite Downs babies as an example since they are often reported as “happy” but “such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care.”
They claim that the moral status of a newborn baby is equivalent to a fetus in that it cannot be considered a person in the “morally relevant sense.” “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. 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 sane person might ask what about adoption? Well these two have an answer for that also. The mother’s emotional state should be considered as a trumping right. If she were to “suffer psychological distress” from giving up her child to someone else then an after-birth abortion should be an allowable alternative.
Something is terribly wrong with this picture. These two idiots think that a mother would be less stressed at murdering her newborn child than giving it up for adoption?
Matthew Archbald of the National Catholic Register says that the legalization of infanticide is the logical conclusion of the starting point of the argument that a fetus is not human and has no rights. “Once you say all human life is not sacred, the rest is just drawing random lines in the sand.”
What next – do we establish the right to murder Seniors and the disabled – maybe we should just get rid of the poor, or blacks, or hispanics. Where will it end?
The editor, Julian Savulescu, of the Journal of Medical Ethics defended his decision to publish the article. He writes. . .”What the response to this article reveals through the microscope of the web, is the deep disorder of the modern world. Not that people will give arguments in favor of infanticide, but the deep oppostion that exists now to liberal values and fanatical opposition to any kind of reasonable engagement.”
I for one do not find advocating for the murder of a newborn reasonable nor do I find those that oppose it disturbing. What is more disturbing is that liberals include the murder of innocent babies as a so-called value.
“America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. . .It has portrayed the greatest of gifts – a child – as a competitor, an intrusion and an inconvenience. . .Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being’s entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend and must not be declared to be contingent on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent.” Mother Teresa
