Nursery Crimes
Burnell F. Eckardt, Jr., on the Move from Abortion to Infanticide
It was bound to come to this, though there likely were very few of us who really believed it would when abortion was first deemed ethically permissible by the U.S. Supreme Court on the fateful day of January 22, 1973.
Back then, the most salient pro-life argument, and the easiest to make, was one that demonstrated logically and biologically that the fetus was as much a person as a born, air-breathing baby.
But now, in an article published on February 23, 2012, in the online Journal of Medical Ethics, under the title, "After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?" (since removed), Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva have advanced an argument that essentially agrees with this pro-life position, but is breathtakingly bold enough to take it in the opposite direction: instead of concluding that a fetus is like a newborn and therefore a person, they assert that a newborn is like a fetus and therefore not a person.
"The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual," they write. Giubilini, a philosopher from the University of Milan, and Minerva, a bioethicist from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, repeatedly aver this throughout the article: "fetuses and newborns are not persons."
Euphemisms & Red Herrings
We recall that in the 1970s those who argued in favor of legalized abortion began to call their position by the euphemism "pro-choice," thus detracting attention from the real issue at stake. For pro-lifers, it has never been about a woman's right to choose what happens to her own body, but about the reality that the life within her is as much a human being as she herself is, and therefore has been endowed by its Creator with the same right to life that she has.
Still, the "pro-choice" label stuck, and so the debate has run for nearly forty years under the somewhat deceptive headings of "pro-life" versus "pro-choice." Many abortion advocates even prefer to label pro-lifers with the moniker "anti-choice." Their preferred argument has been ubiquitous, and remains predominant: the necessity of protecting "a woman's right to choose."
By contrast, arguments against the essence of the pro-life position—that the child in the womb is a living human being—have been extremely rare. Since abortion advocates find it difficult to counter this position, they concentrate instead on what is actually a red herring in the philosophical debate over the permissibility of abortion: a woman's right to choose what happens to her own body. And so the essential pro-life argument—that the prenatal infant is as much a child as the newborn—is usually ignored.
The Pro-Life Argument Turned Upside Down
Burnell F. Eckardt, Jr is pastor of St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Kewanee, Illinois, and chief editor of Gottesdienst: The Journal of Lutheran Liturgy. He holds a Ph.D. in church history from Marquette University.
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